Plantbreeding at Svalöf - continued...

Nilsson-Ehle may have mastered Mendelism, but he depended on Nilsson's pedigrees, his own and his assistants' 'breeder's eye', and the skill of the 'unskilled' work-force of women and children employed to cultivate the fields, for the undeniable successes he had in breeding and marketing new cereal strains like Solhvete.

Parcels and register pages were scarce resources at Svalöv – each parcel and each field book entry consumed space, time, and work–, so that each new way of doing or seeing things had to accommodate itself within pre-existing, and mostly seasoned, ways of doing and seeing things. Innovations, that is, could not simply replace traditions, but rather were grafted onto them. Modern science nests within pre-existing practices and technologies, and the relationship between 'theoretical' and 'practical' knowlegde is therefore not a vertical, but a horizontal one. Breeding registers, as I hope to have shown in this essay, provide an excellent source to uncover the conflicts and synergies that arise from this relationship.