Northshore magazine showcases the best that the North Shore of Boston, MA has to offer.
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NORTHSHOREMAG.COM 48 NOVEMBER 2018 CONTACT grantfamilyfarmessex.com family frequently helps him out. e four acres the chickens mostly forage on are his parents' property; his mechanic father and brother can fix the most broken-down tractor ; and over the years, even his mother has become a far less reluctant chicken farmer. "When she posts pictures of them doing funny things to her Facebook, it's hard for her to say she doesn't like them anymore," he says with a chuckle. Grant also has an eager clientele willing to pay a premium for his fresh eggs and chicken, which are available at farmers' markets in Swampscott, Salem, Marblehead, and Roslindale. e textured, lower-fat meat and fresh, electric-orange-yolked eggs overshadow anything you'd find in a chiller on the perimeter of a supermarket. (He notes that while he uses organic feed and practices, his products are not officially certified organic.) "People are more conscious about where their food comes from when shopping at a farmers' market, they're more concerned about how animals are raised and treated, but the biggest thing that keeps people coming back is the quality," he says. e Grants' enthusiasm helps offset the hardships of farming, a challenging business whose economics are especially hard to manage with the Northeast's sky-high land prices. "In Massachusetts, it's a lot more economical to grow houses than it is to grow chickens or vegetables," Grant says wryly. At the same time, he cherishes chatting with customers at the farmers' market and then heading back out for solitary hours in the field, the juxtaposition built into small-scale agriculture. He recalls his brief detour from the agrarian life at age 22: an internship where he whiled away the hours creating content for his employer's social media feeds—a "dream job for any millennial," he says, but one that drove him to eat lunch outside in the middle of January just to get away from his cubicle. "It's not easy, and it's not extremely lucrative," Grant says of a chicken farmer's life. "But [the reason you keep doing it is] you know in your gut that you're doing something good. I'm able to do other things than just go into an office and spend eight hours a day stapled to the floor. I don't know if you can put a price on that." / F A C E S + P L A C E S / Grant sells his chickens and eggs through local farmers' markets. PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY OF GRANT FAMILY FARM