Balsfjord is a municipality in the Troms County of Northern Norway. The coat-of-arms depicts a yellow plough on a red background, symbolising the importance of agriculture in the municipality. The plough also symbolises that the municipality is at the northernmost border on which grain can be grown in Norway. No other area in Troms has so much cultivated land. Agriculture is mostly based on milk and meat production and Balsfjord has the highest number of cattle, sheep, and goats among the municipalities in Troms. One of the dairies is the country’s largest goat cheese producer.

The Sami people were the first people to inhabit the area, but around 1800 new settlers came from Finland and Southern Norway. Today, very few traces of Sami culture survive. From the 18th until the 20th century, trappers from Balsfjord were active in the Arctic, hunting in the areas around Greenland and Svalbard.

The municipality was home to a religious group of ‘mindekirken’ or ‘freechurch dissenters’ who split from the state church in Tromsø. They were led by a seminary student, Johannes Andreas Johannessen and they established their own church, the Free Apostolic Christian Church, in Balsfjord. Bomstad and his followers were said to have protested against the Tromsø state church minister and Troms Bishop’s religious rulings, eventually leading to a riot in Tromsø. The state church members yelled at Bomstad and his dissenters to “go back to Kautokieno!”. In 1862, Bomstad led a group of colonists to America, arriving into Chicago. After that they went to the area of St. Peter, Minnesota, where they remained. Bomstad left St. Peter and became the founding father of Lake Lillian in Minnesota. After staking his original claim, Bomstad and the rest of the colonists arrived at Lake Lillian and built dugout shelters to live. Eventually they all had log cabins to live in.

Close to Balsfjord Church are 6000-year-old rock carvings at Tennes.