Norwegian strip farming is a variation on the agricultural open field system practiced in much of the rest of Europe from medieval to modern times.
In collective farmsteads where every farmer owned or rented a part of the farm, the properties become complicated.
In the years after the black death, Norway developed, in contrast to most European countries, a particular farm tenure with free and partly independent farmers.
In eastern Norway, the development was distinguished by the strong expansion of the cotters system until its culmination around 1850.
Often, these strips were rotated among the stakeholders to disincentivize unequal land divisions, this was called årsskifte (annual shift).
The custom in western and southern Norway was that the home fields of differing purposes consisted of a complex variety of strips spreading oftentimes to the other farm subdivisions in the collective farmstead.