Call it destiny, or fate, or a case of being in the right place (or class) at the right time. Henry Spies, ’20 graduate from the Department of Animal and Avian Sciences (ANSC), arrived at UMD eyeing a future as a large animal veterinarian. He felt a unique pull towards farm life, but there was something yet to crystallize, an unknown factor waiting to balance the equation. A relatively unplanned elective course within AGNR’s Institute of Applied Agriculture (IAA) soon shifted his entire future, enabling him to give birth to Marsh Creek Cattle & Company (MCCC), a successful pasture-raised animal farm that has risen to prominence in the past three years with a commitment to environmental sustainability, ecosystem health, and herd well-being.
Spies had been selling quarters of beef since he was 15, primarily selling to his friends and neighbors, with an estimated total of 6 or 7 steers each year. But it was a hobby, a passion project, something he did with his brother to build camaraderie and take advantage of the resources available in his backyard to make a small profit.
“Before September 2020, business came only from quarters and halves, and we were just raising the steers at home,” said Spies.“We always had a habit of raising animals, and we had laid a good customer foundation.”
The reality of a full time operation came into view when Spies enrolled in Farm Business Management, an elective course in the IAA, which delivered him the confidence he needed to give it a real go. Spies credits a very specific skill he learned in the class, a key element to beginning farmer success called enterprise budgeting. Shannon Dill with UMD Extension (UME) describes this concept across the various enterprises that exist on a farm, citing examples like a retail produce market, horse hay sales, or a fall petting zoo.
“These contribute to the whole farm operation,” said Dill.“ It is important to understand the returns, various costs, and ultimately the profitability of each enterprise versus another. The ‘enterprise budget’ enables you to do that.”
Spies applied this critical skill to his business model and began to sketch out exactly how he could make a profit from each of his enterprises, which included beef and pork, with poultry to be added shortly thereafter. His dad was raising chickens for Perdue, but had recently stopped and was considering selling his poultry operation. By applying enterprise budgeting to poultry, Spies and his father were able to clearly delineate how much profit was attached to each bird. Almost overnight, MCCC added a new, profitable enterprise producing 7,000 birds in 2021 alone.
Today, MCCC exists on the Spies family 77-acre farm, 35 of which are tillable. They’ve slowly been converting those available acres to pasture, and are aggressively deploying their pasture-raised and rotational grazing model, which Spies cites as a key theme for all of their animals. He fundamentally looks at profit per acre rather than production per acre, using the farm footprint as strategically as he can.
“We strive to use the parts of the farm that make the most sense for each species. They all individually contribute to sustaining the ecosystem of the farm,” said Spies. “When we rotate or graze our cattle, our hens are right behind them on the same pasture. The hogs are in the woods in a totally separate paddock. This gives the animals freedom of movement, healthy soil and food, and fresh air, all while allowing different parts of the farm to recover because they’re not all being used at once. And we hardly have any inputs, like chemicals, because animals are laying down their own unique manure.”
Spies has figured it out, and he’s making it work, thanks to his education in AGNR and skills learned on the job like grant writing. He recently secured a $20K grant from MARBIDCO (Maryland Agricultural & Resource-Based Industry Development Corporation) to install a walk-in freezer for storage, which was a huge barrier to market entry that he quickly overcame. All of this has happened just in the last three years. AGNR can’t wait to see where Spies takes things from here.
By Graham Binder