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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.”

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 competitive ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ grant program designed to help students explore their relationship with nature.

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.

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.”

Through , Skarstad found Norwegian hosts Anders Braanaas and Hilde Buer. 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 still maintain their separate farms, Skarstad helped them both during her visit, often driving a banged-up Czech car between the two farms.

At first, the experience felt 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 of a point,” she says now. “We were working to keep pace with the earth.”