Hello, I’m Grace, and together with my husband Phil, own and operate NorthPlace Farm in Troy, Maine.

I am from Frankfort, and in 2022 I finally succeeded in dragging Phil home to Waldo County. We were incredibly fortunate to end up in Troy on the beautiful land that operated as “Fiddlehead Farm” under the previous owners, the Wilson Family.

Phil and I met in 2011 in North Carolina, both working for MillerCoors brewing company; Phil as a brewing supervisor, and me as a microbiologist in the quality lab, trying to make some money for veterinary school. I moved across the mountains to Tennessee for vet school, and from there we’ve followed each other through Alabama, Idaho and Washington, the Finger Lakes region of New York, and at long last to our permanent home here in Troy. After all that time pushing to head North to get home, NorthPlace seemed a fitting name for our farm. It is also an amalgamation of our last names, Normann (Man of the North) and Platz (Place).

You can still find Phil brewing beer, as he runs production for the wonderful people of Bigelow Brewing in Skowhegan, and me crisscrossing the state for my job as a field veterinarian with the USDA. Where we both really want to be though, is here on the farm. I grew up on my parents’ small farm in Frankfort in a house they built themselves, and learned the beauty of hard work, bootstrapping, and big ambitions, while also learning to just appreciate the beauty around me. We’re still using some of those first pieces of heavily used haying equipment my parents sourced to start their own farm, and I am fiercely proud of those roots, and to be part of the mission to keep Maine farming.