By Christina Ferrari - On the bottom of Ben Grimes’ front door is a small gold plaque, engraved with three words- “A Good Life”. Simple, but not easy on a 20-acre working farm.
“The thing with farming,” Grimes says, “is that you’re always on the precipice of disaster. It always works out. Until it doesn’t.”
Grimes founded Dawnbreaker Farms in Hurdle Mills, North Carolina back in 2013. After 4 years of living in Cameroon and teaching English, he and his first wife at the time returned to the United States with the intent of starting their own farm. Between raising heritage breed Guinea hogs, balancing livestock and vegetable plots and trying to build a life outside of farming, Grimes was schooled in hardship.
The early days were filled with mistakes, makeshift equipment, and few hands, but a good farmer is a constant learner. As the years went on, Grimes found his niche in sustainable poultry, specializing in chickens, ducks, your Thanksgiving turkey and a few pigs and cattle raised on the side.
Dave Snyder, a retired lab manager at Duke University and an intermittent farmhand at Dawnbreaker, was one of those first pairs of hands. He remembers when he and Grimes would cut chickens into pieces off a trailer in the backyard. “A lot of people don’t realize what goes into processing meat”, Snyder said. With experience, patience, the gradual implementation of machinery like scalders and electric saws, plus a few ducks that got, well, “ducked” up, Grimes and his small team can now “process” (kill, pluck, eviscerate and shrink-wrap) nearly 250 birds in an afternoon.
“I want to push the frontiers of what farmers can do and what they can make,” Grimes said. “I’m trying to set farming up for the next generation, and make it a viable opportunity.”
Like many farmers testing the economic and social viability of sustainable agriculture, Grimes began farming without family land or a background in agriculture. An environmental ethos was instilled in him as a young boy growing up in Seattle, by his mother who worked for Birkenstock. Grimes was raised to be mindful of what kind of footprint he wanted to leave on the planet. While studying history at Oregon State, he read the Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan and was fascinated by the destructive nature of the American food system.
“The very act of eating is detrimental,” he said. “The Omnivore’s Dilemma woke me up and lit a fire in me.” Grimes devotes his attention and resources to building healthier soils for healthier animals.
This is not the case for many farms across the state. North Carolina is home to over 4,600 poultry farms that produce around 1 billion chickens and turkeys each year. In 2022, the Charlotte Observer and The News & Observer launched an investigative series around the social and environmental impacts of Big Poultry, and found that nearly 2.5 billion pounds of chicken waste and litter go unmanaged, allowing pollutants to end up in streams and local waterways. “We live in a broken food system,” Grimes said. “The industrial food system is cheapening food and covering up the real cost.”
Grimes considers himself not only a farmer, but an “ecosystem manager.” Walking around the 20 acres of Dawnbreaker can feel like taking a hike on an overgrown trail. Waist-high grasses and milkweed fill the areas between pastures, and most of it’s there on purpose. It’s a “land extensive” approach, Grimes says, rather than “land intensive”. Across five different pastures enclosed with electric fencing, he plants rye, cowpeas, sorghum, and millet for his birds and rotates their locations weekly to allow the areas to rest and regrow. His pigpens are intertwined with old forest, and the dilapidated tobacco barns on his property house young chickens and turkeys.
For every pack of sausage or drumsticks, Grimes can guarantee that the animal spent its life with feet or hooves in the soil. While most of his profit is made through Dawnbreaker’s CSA program or by selling wholesale to restaurants and local businesses, customers can find him at the Carrboro Farmer’s Market, with his face tucked under a baseball cap and shrouded by a periwinkle tent that promises “Pasture Raised, Non-GMO, No Antibiotics or Hormones”.
His customers swear it’s far better than anything you’ll find in the grocery store.
“I’m grateful I get to do this,” Grimes said. “But at the same time, I wish it was easier.”
In a perfect world, “A Good Life” would be on 150 acres, raising cattle regeneratively in a slower, less involved process with higher payout. He would be able to spend more time with his family and less on emails and budgets and slaughter. Grimes wants to buy his neighbor's land, which is currently used to raise cow-calf pairs in a land-intensive continuous grazing system. The calves get sold at auction and shipped to the Midwest, where they will be fed a grain diet in a CAFO until slaughter.
Grimes wants to build soil health on the land and keep the full value of the production local by finishing the beef on grass and selling it here. In reality, land is expensive. More extensive investment in agricultural easement programs might make it possible for Ben to one day buy his neighbors land, instead of watching it get developed into a subdivision.
For now, he’ll link arms with his daughter Eva as they chat with regulars in the early mist of the market, selling birds that knew some variation of the “Not-So-Bad” life.
