HARFORD COUNTY, Md — Rolling hills and cascading corn fields greet you from the barn.
It's easy to see how Grand View Farm got its name.
For a while, Nick Bailey's dad was a row crop farmer until his patience ran out.
"Didn't like the business; I didn't like the chemicals; I just knew that that wasn't the way he wanted to manage the land," said Nick Bailey, farmer.
In 2012, a trip to a farm in Virginia transformed this farm in Harford County, abandoning the rows of crops for open pastures and filling them with chickens, cows, and pigs.
"We started in 2012 with just a cow and 25 egg layers, and we had a worn-down barn here, and we started having customers coming out here on the weekends and grabbing a dozen eggs, and we just had a little dryer sheet box as a money box, real humble beginnings," Bailey says.
25 egg layers and a cow have turned into this.
"So we do 100% grass-fed beef, pigs on pasture, egg layers out on pasture, and broiler chickens, which are your meat chickens out on pasture," Bailey stated.
The leap of faith has worked out, fueled by an increase in people choosing local, grass-fed, cleanly raised meats.
"The core of our business now has become shipping directly to folks front doors."
Bailey says grass-fed beef like his is cleaner and more nutrient-dense.
"Cattle were never intended to eat grain; they're herbivores, so you don't have all these inputs that are unnatural, so from a health standpoint, we're already starting way ahead of the industrial cattle system."
Grand View even has a way of treating illnesses without antibiotics, getting rid of a pink eye issue in the herd without using medications.
"It took us a couple years, but we used genetics to get that out of them. We bred it out of them. We went back, and we identified those cows that are causing that issue. And we called those cows; we bred out that health issue; it took a couple of years, but now we have a cattle herd that has zero pink eye which is almost unheard of."
You might think, if grass-fed is a better product, why choose to raise cattle any other way?
"It's tough; farming is a tough business no matter how you do it. Right, but when you're doing it the way we are, we found it's much more mentally rewarding."
