Norwich — Many teenagers might think of farming as a quaint pastime for the older generation.

Not Norwich Free Academy senior Olivia Krauss, who grew up visiting her great-grandparents’ farm in Allensville, Pa. — the heart of Amish country — and helping her grandfather in Lisbon plant his huge vegetable garden each year.

“I always wanted to do the farming thing,” Krauss, 18, said. “I always kind of wanted to farm, but it’s not always the most financially stable career.”

With climate change, droughts and changing attitudes about genetically modified foods, Krauss at first thought of studying farming policy or government oversight.

“But I don’t really want that,” she admitted.

Krauss, who will graduate from NFA on June 15, will attend the University of New Hampshire to study sustainable agriculture and food systems. She wants to raise livestock, “pigs, cows, chickens,” she said. She has nine chickens at her Ross Hill Road home in Lisbon.

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Her parents, William and Melissa Krauss, have taken Olivia and her two brothers, Carl, now 20, and William, 15, to Melissa's grandparents Ralph and Anne Metz's 200-acre farm in Pennsylvania every year.

Olivia became friends with an Amish family who own a traditional farm nearby.

Her father always has been an outdoorsman. He taught his three children how to hunt, fish and respect nature.

“She probably picked up on that more than our other two kids have,” William Krauss said.

Olivia shot and cleaned her first turkey when she was 11, her first deer at age 13. She does catch-and-release fishing.

“Because turkey hunting is in spring, we tend to have a lot of Thanksgiving dinners in summer,” she said.

Krauss learned a lesson in middle school that proved farming laws can be complicated.

Krauss’ Environmental Club at Lisbon Central School purchased two pigs and gave them to a local farmer. Students collected cafeteria excess food for the pigs. The food recycling program was going well until the state shut it down because the food was not pasteurized.

“The pig program was a really great learning experience,” Melissa Krauss said. “The guy from the (Food and Drug Administration) came in and talked to the kids about why this was a problem.”

The class then raised trout in a huge aquarium to release in Blissville Brook in Lisbon. That worked except for a “major accident” with the filter that sucked in and killed half the hatchlings, Krauss said. Still, the students released a couple of hundred trout into the brook.

Krauss was among seventh-grade students from 30 schools who attended a Kids’ Consortium at UNH’s environmental program. She bought a UNH sweatshirt and wore it for the next five years.

“I just replaced it with this new one,” she said, tugging at the UNH sweatshirt.

Krauss’ guidance counselors at NFA have been impressed with her diverse activities and academic success. Krauss has been a member of the Southeastern Regional Action Council, a student leadership conference that tackles social issues. She was a member of Students Against Destructive Decisions at NFA through her junior year, and was a peer tutor.

Krauss said she curtailed school activities this year to concentrate on her studies. But she still volunteers regularly at the Kitty Harbor cat rescue shelter in Griswold, where she cleans litter boxes and plays with cats and kittens.

It wasn’t a stray cat that Krauss and her boyfriend, Justin Benson, an NFA senior, chased through urban Taftville last August but a chicken. The teens chased the bird through streets, yards and thickets before catching it. They brought it home to Krauss’ henhouse.

At 5 the next morning, the bird let the Krauss family — and probably a few neighbors — know that it was really a young rooster, which resembles a hen. Lisbon zoning regulations allow roosters only on larger farms, so her mother said the rooster had to go.

Melissa Krauss said she expected her daughter would study farming policy rather than actual farming, but said the girl’s experiences have prepared her well for her choice.

“She comes at it from a different perspective,” her mother said, “because she hunts, too. She understands the balance. When you farm you raise the animals for food. They’re not pets, they’re your livelihood.”

c.bessette@theday.com

Twitter: @Bessettetheday