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In May 1972, 20-year-old Liese Greensfelder arrived in a small town in western Norway to startling news: the farmer who had offered her a summer job had just suffered a crippling stroke. Two days later, the young Californian found herself living alone on his ancient mountain farm at the end of a dirt road high above magnificent Hardanger Fjord. Under her care were 115 sheep, two cows, a draft horse, and a young herding dog.

Please join us for Liese’s presentation of stories from her year on the Hovland farm. Confronted with dangers and obstacles for which she was utterly unprepared, hers is a story of remarkable resilience which records the fascinating but rapidly vanishing centuries-old traditions and farming methods of the local community that took her under its wing.

Liese Greensfelder is a freelance writer who focuses on medicine, biology and agriculture. She has worked as a farm adviser for the University of California Cooperative Extension and as science writer for UC San Francisco and UC Berkley, and she initiated an agricultural development project in the Guatemalan highlands. In 1975, an epistolary account of her first six months on Johannes’ farm became a bestselling book in Norway. She lives in rural Nevada County, California on western slope of the Sierra Nevada Mountains.

Every few years Liese returns to Norway, where she has maintained a close connection with the neighbors who supported her throughout her year as a greenhorn farmer in Hardanger.