{"id":1852,"date":"2009-01-09T11:47:05","date_gmt":"2009-01-09T16:47:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/batesviews.net\/?p=1852"},"modified":"2024-07-08T13:41:06","modified_gmt":"2024-07-08T17:41:06","slug":"a-farmers-life-grows-on-otis-fellow-anna-skarstad-11","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/2009\/01\/09\/a-farmers-life-grows-on-otis-fellow-anna-skarstad-11\/","title":{"rendered":"A farmer's life grows on Otis fellow Anna Skarstad '11"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Anna

Anna Skarstad '11<\/p><\/div>\n

Anna Skarstad ’11 wants to be a farmer, but she’s not willing to hoe that row until she understands why. And she knows that farming is hard. “It’s deeper, too,” she says. “It’s a life.”<\/p>\n

Which is the reason Skarstad lived amidst Norwegian farmers last summer, hoping to learn a little about their lives and more about her own. Supporting her travel was an Otis Fellowship<\/a>, a competitive Bates grant program designed to help students explore their relationship with nature.<\/p>\n

Skarstad, of Pleasantville, N.Y., wasn’t raised to farm. Her father is a noted violinmaker, and her mother is a composer. In fact, her father’s Norwegian grandparents abandoned a family farm to come to the U.S.<\/p>\n

But the urge to work the land apparently didn’t leave the Skarstad genome. When she was 10, Skarstad saw a documentary about Norwegian farming. She saw men, tethered by ropes, descending a Norwegian hillside to harvest hay. “I couldn’t believe that was a reality,” she says. “I wanted to go to Norway to see how the farmers survive.”<\/p>\n

Through World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms<\/a>, Skarstad found Norwegian hosts Anders Braanaas<\/a> and Hilde Buer<\/a>. Each had been widowed several years ago, and, to skip a lot of details, “the two sheep farmers fell in love,” explains Skarstad. As the pair\u00a0still maintain their\u00a0separate farms, Skarstad helped them both during her visit, often driving a banged-up Czech car between the two farms.<\/p>\n

At first, the experience\u00a0felt helter-skelter: painting a barn here, putting up a fence there. “All the tasks seemed unrelated, like pods of work,” she says. Slowly, Skarstad saw unity in all the farm duties. “It all had so much<\/em> of a point,” she says now. “We were working to keep pace with the earth.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Anna Skarstad ’11 wants to be a farmer, but she’s not willing to hoe that row until she understands why. And she knows that farming is hard. “It’s deeper, too,” she says. “It’s a life.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":148,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_hide_ai_chatbot":false,"_ai_chatbot_style":"","associated_faculty":[],"_Page_Specific_Css":"","_bates_restrict_mod":false,"_table_of_contents_display":false,"_table_of_contents_location":"","_table_of_contents_disableSticky":false,"_is_featured":false,"footnotes":"","_bates_seo_meta_description":"","_bates_seo_block_robots":false,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_id":0,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_twitter_id":0,"_bates_seo_share_title":"","_bates_seo_canonical_overwrite":"","_bates_seo_twitter_template":""},"categories":[232,220,224],"tags":[664,1690,11003,6530,6954,6958],"class_list":["post-1852","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment-sustainability","category-service","category-society-culture","tag-agriculture","tag-biology","tag-europe","tag-norway","tag-philip-j-otis-endowment","tag-philip-j-otis-fellowship"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1852","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/148"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1852"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1852\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":62487,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1852\/revisions\/62487"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1852"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1852"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1852"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}