HARPSWELL — For years, Joe Grady couldn’t stomach eating animals.

Grain-fed meat was too fatty, the life of livestock raised on factory farms was too grim, and red meat, he thought, might have played a role in the prostate cancer that took his father’s life.

He became a vegetarian and, later, a vegan.

But on 88 coastal farmland acres on Neils Point in Harpswell, Grady has changed his mind and is hoping to change others.

“It’s all about education,” said Grady, a teacher by training. “You don’t have to go too far on any given day to see that meat gets a bad rap, about being bad for the environment and unethical and all of that.”

Yards away from a picnic table outside the small store at Two Coves Farm on a windy April day, a noisy flock of guinea hens climbed through thick grass toward a mobile corral where six Belted Galloway steer were grazing and lazing in the sun.

In his farm’s third year, Grady is preparing to sell six cattle, 28 lambs, 500 chickens and 100 Thanksgiving turkeys.

“There’s hardly ever a distinction made between the ways that meat is raised,” Grady said. “There’s a ton of meat out there that is an absolute abomination.”

No more dilemma

This is the first year that Grady has not divided his priorities between the farm and a teaching job at Casco Bay High School in Portland. He now dedicates all of his time to raising livestock alongside his wife, Laura, and his three children.

That was a big shift, Grady said, but “the transition is far from complete.”

More than a decade ago, farming was far from his mind, until he spent time working with a small pasture at a New Hampshire boarding school where he taught.

“All we’re trying to do is collect sunlight and minerals and water and turn it into food with as little interference as possible,” Grady said. “It’s just a fabulous system.”

But in embracing that system, there were deeper implications — about slaughter — with which Grady had to wrangle.

“Life and death intermingle and you can’t completely separate one from the other,” Grady said. “These are domesticated animals that I feel we have a duty and obligation to care as best we can for them, but I don’t have a problem with the end of that cycle coming and that death going to create more life.”

That view, of a system pulsing at once with birth, life, death and decay, put his moral troubles to rest.

“When I understood that all that worked together and that — on a certain scale and in a certain way — the raising of meat could be beneficial for people, for animals, for the environment, there was no more dilemma for me,” Grady said.

On site, Grady is able to slaughter and process poultry. The cattle, lambs and pigs still have to make the trip to a facility in Windsor.

With lambs bred on his farm, cattle from Freeport and pigs from Avon, Grady said he’s happy to keep the cycle local, but the transportation process still gives him pause.

“One of the most disagreeable parts of the whole thing — especially for the cattle — is loading up,” Grady said. “These cows have spent their whole life out there on the grass and all of the sudden they are in a trailer.”

In a conversation with other local farmers earlier this year at a Kennebec Estuary Land Trust event at Bowdoin College, Grady said he floated the idea of a mobile slaughterhouse that would allow slaughter and cleaning to happen on site, but that’s still a wish.

“I don’t know if that will ever happen, but there’s a big appeal to it in my opinion,” Grady said.

Tending the soil

When Grady became serious about farming, he delved heavily into the lessons of people like Joel Salatin, whose land in Virginia has become a model for pasture farmers.

“He says that ‘if it smells bad or looks bad, it’s not good farming.’ Period.”

Mounds of compost sit out in the open between the temporary cattle enclosure and a mobile chicken coop that carries the birds to different parts of the pasture.

Done properly, Grady said, compost is nothing to hide from — it doesn’t stink and, with time, that same waste becomes food for the plants that provide food for the animals in “an almost input-less system.”

Grady gives some grain to the chickens, pigs, and the family milk cow, but the sheep and cattle stick to foraging grass or eating hay from the field. He hasn’t brought in fertilizer and doesn’t plan to any time soon.

“It’s called managed grazing,” Grady said of the farming method with no permanent fencing. “The idea is that you’re producing a crop, harvesting it and letting it grow again — not breaking ground, not planting seed, not using fossil fuels.”

In “letting nature do its thing,” Grady keeps the focus of his livestock operation squarely on the soil.

“Ultimately, it’s the only thing anybody should care about because everything you grow — whether it’s got roots or hooves — is only going to be as good as the soil you’re growing it on,” Grady said.

The soil at Two Coves is rich not only for pasture, but for Grady’s first passion: teaching.

“Every single square foot can be a teaching moment of some kind,” Grady said. “It’s an environment that is full of opportunities to learn new things.”

Education

“A lot of my own journey is about getting grabbed by this stuff and saying ‘Holy smokes! That’s amazing!’ I see that experience with kids too,” Grady said. “They might not ever think about food or farming or anything but then they do and it’s like ‘oh boy, that makes a lot of sense.’”

For smaller operations like his, “the model should be about getting people out on the farm.”

Aside from tending the land, managing a farm store and training two shepherding border collies, Grady schedules regular educational events at the farm.

“To let that aspect of the potential that is here — to let that go unutilized — that’s a shame,” Grady said. “You’re doing everything at once — you’re educating people, you’re involving them, you’re building relationships.”

Ultimately, Grady hopes those relationships will help to accomplish bigger things, bringing food production closer to home and closing the loop on a national system of food production he said is unsustainable.

“The inter-continental, inter-state, inter-stellar system of food delivery — it’s going to come to an end,” Grady said. “It needs to stop right now, but the fact is that it’s going to take time.”

dfishell@timesrecord.com

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