According to Mats Widgren the "palaeobotanical evidence from settlements and the pollen analysis of lake sediments" suggest a system of crop rotation. In his view "the survival in equal proportion of barley and rye among the charred seed remains" is evidence of contemporaries sowing rye in the Winter followed by barley in the Spring. Moreover he observes that the survival of pollen from sheep's sorrel would indicate that "fallow was also part of the rotation." Mats Widgren, "Fields and Field Systems in Scandinavia During the Middle Ages" in Medieval Farming and Technology: The Impact of Agricultural Change in Northwest Europe (Brill, 1997), 180.

As for the plow, Janken Myrdal has shown that the plow was introduced into southern Jutland by the ninth century and consequently spread to the rest of Denmark.

In southern Norway it appears to have arrived somewhat later although the picture is comparatively blurred, with the arrival dated problematically to somewhere in the eleventh or twelfth century. Myrdal, "The Agricultural Transformation of Sweden 1000-1300" in Medieval Farming and Technology: The Impact of Agricultural Change in Northwest Europe (Brill, 1997), 153-155.

According to Myrdal this was the foot plow rather than a wheeled variant, although Lynn White has contended that the wheeled plow did get transferred from Denmark to England sometime in the late ninth or early tenth century. Lynn White, Medieval Technology and Social Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), 51-54.

Much of the barley would be malted to make beer and it was common for farmers to live off of a grain heavy diet. Christiensen has shown how this was "crushed, soaked and heated with butter or whey to make grautr." This would be complimented with "barley, rye, oats, bran, field-beans, wild strawberries, hazelnuts, blackberries, raspberries, elderberries and fish." Sheep, cattle, pigs and even horses were all known to be raised and consumed to round out the meat portion of their diet. Eric Christiensen, *Norsemen in the Viking Age" (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2002), 205, 314.