Five decades ago, Liese (pronounced Lisa) Greensfelder was a young Californian who had traveled to a remote fjord in Norway to spend the summer of 1972 working on a rural farm.
Upon arriving, the 20-year-old received unexpected news – the farmer she’d planned to work for had suffered a serious stroke and needed her to run the farm.
With no farming experience, Greensfelder nervously agreed to take on the responsibility of managing the old mountain farm high above the magnificent Hardanger Fjord. With the help of neighbors, she learned to farm the traditional way, without modern equipment, using horses instead of tractors, milking cows by hand and hiking high into the mountains to manage a flock of sheep.
Midway during her year at the farm, a Norwegian news personality discovered and documented her journey, propelling her into the spotlight and turning Greensfelder into a national celebrity.
Now, she shares the full story of that life-changing year in a new memoir, “Accidental Shepherd: How a California Girl Rescued an Ancient Mountain Farm in Norway.”
“My year on the farm was a major part of my life. I needed to write this book because I absolutely fell in love with the farm, my neighbors there, and the mountains and I wanted to share all of this with others,” said Greensfelder.
The community is invited to a free book signing and presentation, the launch event for her West Coast book tour at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 4 at the North Columbia Schoolhouse Cultural Center at 17894 Tyler Foote Rd. on the San Juan Ridge.
The memoir, published by the University of Minnesota Press, is getting noticed.
“Accidental Shepherd keeps an open, smart, frank tone, and Liese Greensfelder’s good humor working through problems shines. The farm animals come wonderfully through—especially the sheep and difficult lamb birth. She offers a good balance of light and dark with lots of enlightening detail,” wrote Gary Snyder, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, author and essayist.
A life-long journey
Greensfelder grew up in Northern California hiking the trails of Mt. Tamalpais and the Sierra Nevada. At 17, she spent a year in Denmark as an exchange student. Nearly two years after returning to California, she traveled to Norway where she lived for two-and-a-half years working on a farm, studying at an agricultural school and working aboard a Norwegian coastal freighter.
Now a freelance science writer, Greensfelder is more accustomed to writing about medicine, biology and agriculture. Retelling the story about her time on the farm in a narrative style was something new and challenging for the author who isn’t accustomed to tapping into her feelings. The story that had bounced around in her mind for decades took her three years to write, and re-write.
“This book has been on my mind ever since I came back from Norway. I just had to get it out into the world,” Greensfelder said. “Expressing my feelings was the hardest part.”
It’s her second book recounting her experience on Johannes’s farm. A collection of letters she wrote home to her family during her first six months on the farm was published in Norway in 1975 and became a best-seller there.
For years, Greensfelder’s thoughts would drift back to the time when she first arrived in the small Norwegian town of Øystese where no one spoke English. She recalls arriving by bus after an exhausting six-week journey to get there. She found herself with no car or bicycle at a centuries-old mountain farm at the end of a dirt road. The owner, a 65-year-old farmer named Johannes, had just been hospitalized. From his hospital bed, he asked her to care for Hovland Farm and the 115 sheep, two cows, one calf, a draft horse and a Norwegian herding dog.
She nervously said ‘yes.’
“I had the responsibility to the animals. I couldn’t leave them no matter how hard it got in the winter. I wasn’t going to leave,” said Greensfelder.
During her year-long struggle for the farm’s survival, Greensfelder clashed with Johannes, who she found to be a heartless man who for years had alienated his neighbors, neglected the farm and abused the farm animals.
Three miles from town, in an enclave of farms without modern equipment, neighbors came to the rescue, teaching Greensfelder sustainable farming practices passed down through generations.
“This community really pulled together to help me,” said Greensfelder, who chronicled the dangers and obstacles she faced, recording the rapidly vanishing traditions of the community that took her in. She felt a profound loyalty to the neighboring community who helped her.
Already fluent in Danish, a language closely related to Norwegian, she picked up the ancient local dialect, learned to ski and learned the value of hard work. She milked cows by hand, used horse and wagon, made hay in the rain and hiked into the mountains to check on her flock. Greensfelder grew physically stronger each day and began to feel like a member of the tight-knit community.
“I had a wonderful relationship with my neighbors, but was really isolated from the rest of the country during the year I lived on the farm. What I was seeing was this old way of farming. I look at my book as a look into the past. My neighbors produced a lot of their own food: they had cows for milk and sheep for meat, they made their own bread, and many of them grew their own potatoes and vegetables,” said Greensfelder. During the seven months that she had a cow to milk two times a day, nearly half her diet consisted of milk.
What was supposed to be a three-month job, turned into a year and caught the attention of national news.
“All those things melded together to create a firestorm of publicity,” said Greensfelder. On her website, her adventures are well documented in early video footage, Norwegian magazine covers and a collection of black and white photos.
Looking back, even though the year was difficult, she says she wouldn’t change a thing. She hopes other young women will be inspired by her story.
“Despite the hardship of work and the immense responsibility, I loved what I was dong. I slid into this community and everyone wanted me to succeed, not just for my sake, but because they wanted the farm to succeed. My friendships, the animals, the work, my hikes into the mountains … I was captivated by all of it. If you ever find yourself having an experience like that, stay there and be there,” said Greensfelder.
With a B.S. and M.S. in plant sciences, and a master’s certificate in science communication, Greensfelder has worked as a county farm advisor, spearheaded an agricultural development project in the Guatemalan highlands and has written hundreds of articles about research in science, engineering and medicine, both as a freelancer and as a writer in the news offices of three University of California campuses. She lives with her husband, a furniture maker, on an off-grid, cooperatively-owned 120-acre parcel on the San Juan Ridge.
Over the years, she has often returned to Norway and the farming community she loves. Many of the neighbors she knew have long since passed away and some farms have consolidated. The traditional sustainable ways of farming she learned are all but forgotten, replaced by more time-efficient modern techniques. Making hay for the sheep and cows, which took her months of hard labor can now be accomplished in a day.
“If my book inspires somebody to go out into the world to work on a conservation project or on a sustainable farm, or to just find a way to make the world a better place, that would be awesome,” she said.
Learn more about Accidental Shepherd
Learn more about Author Liese Greensfelder