The Spencers take a natural approach to their operation at Hideaway Farms
LONDON, ARK. – The first thing anyone needs to know about Jennah Spencer is don’t tell her what she can’t do.
She freely admits anytime she is told she can’t do something, the Arkansas native stiffens up and immediately sets her mind to proving the naysayers wrong.
When local farmers told the 22-year-old Jennah and her parents, Ashlea and Al Spencer, that they wouldn’t be able to run a farm just using sustainable farming techniques, Hideaway Farms went from a passion project to something even bigger for the Spencer family.
“If somebody tells me I shouldn’t do something that I know is not a wrong thing to do,” Jennah said. “If they tell me I shouldn’t do something because it’s not going to work out or I’m not capable of doing it, that just gives me more trash emphasis to want to do it when I know it can be done and that’s how it should be done.”
Hideaway Farms in London, Ark., has approximately 275 farm animals on 45 acres, including 200 chickens and 18 beef cows.
While it produces beef, pork and poultry products, Hideaway Farm’s main revenue source is raw dairy milk.
“Originally, it started with Jennah. She wanted farm animals, and my husband and I do not have a farm background, but she wanted animals that we wouldn’t eat. So she opted for dairy goats and things like that,” Ashlea explained. “As she got older and realized where our food actually came from, then we started raising pigs. Then we got a dairy cow. The main product we sell is raw cow’s milk.”
Hideaway Farm produces milk from nine dairy cows, a combination of miniature Jersey, full-size Jersey, and a few mixes. However, they are currently only milking three of them, producing 10 gallons of milk daily.
“I try to keep milk in stock all year round,” Ashlea said. “That’s usually how everybody finds us too. Everybody searches for raw milk or somewhere to find raw milk, and then they start buying meat. But everybody that contacts us, that’s new customers, they’re usually here for the raw milk and then most of them start buying meat or other things. It’s a lot easier to find farms around here that raise beef and even especially pork, but even lamb, but there are not a lot of places that sell milk. There’s not a lot of dairy farms here.”
According to the Spencers, there are so few dairy farms in the area, partly because of the constant work required and the finances involved in running a dairy farm compared to a farm that strictly produces beef.
“For starters for the farmers, it’s a lot easier to raise an animal for one to two years and you get thousands of dollars’ worth of meat versus you raise a dairy cow, even if they’re already milking at the beginning and then you raise them for two years, you’re not going to get, in theory, thousands of dollars worth of just milk,” Jennah said. “Talking about commercial farms, if you had a smaller farm like us where we could sell the milk, and then if somebody goes through and starts selling cream, start selling cheese and all the byproducts like that, you could make a lot of money off of it. But most commercial farms are just going to do the easiest, quickest turnaround. So at the end of the two years, you get a whole beef cow that goes in the freezer, you get thousands of dollars versus a dairy cow, you’re not going to get that much.”
It also doesn’t make it easier that Hideaway Farms is an all-natural, sustainable endeavor.
After Ashlea endured a bout of Lyme Disease a few years ago from a tick bite and had a bad reaction to antibiotics, the family began to look into what was going into their food and what they were putting in their bodies.
From that deep research dive, Hideaway Farms created an all-natural and sustainable lifestyle for themselves and the farm animals.
“That just kind of opened our eyes to the benefits of raising our own food and the way we do raise our food,” Ashlea said. “Like the chickens, they’re out on pasture. They get moved twice a day. We don’t do confinement housing of any sort. They’re not in a barn in a stall. The cows are out on pasture 100 percent. We feed no grain at all. The dairy cows do get grained after milking, but not the beef cows. We aren’t certified organic, but we follow organic practices. We feed non-GMO feed.”
The Spencers want to keep growing in the coming years. Even though just Jennah and Ashlea run farm during the week (Al has a full-time job), Jennah wants to get her hands on more land.
For Ashlea, it comes back down to the original goal of Hideaway Farms.
“I want to be able to just provide the healthy, humane meat that we are providing now, but I want to be able to provide it year-round for more people than we do,” she said. “Because right now we have such smaller numbers that we’re running out of all of our products, except for milk, multiple times a year. That’s where I’m hoping to go with it to be able to have more animals so that way we can provide more families, but also just provide it longer amounts of the year.”
