Today I'm talking with Alisha at Ranch Wife Marketing. You can also follow on Facebook.

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00:00
You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. Today I'm talking with Alicia at Ranch Wife Marketing in North Dakota. Good afternoon. How are you? I'm doing good. How are you doing? I'm good. How's the weather in South Dakota this afternoon?

00:22
North Dakota, um but it is getting better. We did have a negative 50 wind chills just a day or two ago, but now we're at least above zero. So for us, we can finally go back out in a sweatshirt. Nice. Did I say South Dakota? I swear my brain is not working today. You did. It's okay. Oh, North Dakota, the one above South Dakota. Jeez. uh In Minnesota today, it is really cold.

00:50
I am looking out my bedroom window at uh the tin roof of the bedroom next to me and the snow is all sparkly in the sunshine. It's really beautiful, but it's too cold. Oh yes, I get it. We don't get a ton of snow, not as much as Minnesota. I was born and raised there, so I know how much snow falls there. We're a little drier, so we don't have em as much snow, but we do have a little dusting currently.

01:17
Just out of curiosity, where are you in North Dakota? I'm actually on the North Dakota-South Dakota border. I live about 20 miles from South Dakota. um We live on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation um in a small, tiny town called Selfridge. Okay, cool. Well, for the people who are following along on the podcast about my barn cats, um

01:46
We had a stray barn cat show up here a month ago maybe, and she has been kind of hiding out. She'll come and eat every other day. And we have three kittens that we got a couple months ago. They're about five months old. And today is the first day that I have seen her, seen the stray hanging out with the other kittens in the dog house in the sunshine on the hay bales. And I think she's probably around the same age as the three kittens. So,

02:14
That was the banner moment of my day was seeing this beautiful tortoiseshell stray cat hanging out with the kittens. Oh, that's amazing. We have plenty of cats around here, um both indoor and outdoor. I love seeing all the kittens as they grow up in the summer. Yeah, it's really fun. And this cat showed up out of nowhere. I was like, why is there another cat? We don't have six cats. We have five.

02:42
and my husband happened to get a photo of her and I was like, Oh, I hope she sticks around because she's beautiful. And from my local listeners, we have tons of chicken eggs in our farm stand. Farm stand is heated so the eggs don't freeze and we have lots of eggs in the farm stand for sale every day. So if anybody needs eggs, come on by. And that's it for my updates for my house, my homestead. Alicia, you are

03:11
farmer, but you're also a marketer. So can we talk about both? Yeah. So if my husband listens in, he's going to cringe because we're actually ranchers. worries. Some people call it cattle farming. Some people call it ranching. It's all about where you are in the world. But yeah, so we have a cow-calf ranch. We run about 500 mama cows.

03:37
about 200 heifers. We breed some bulls and sell some bulls as well. And we also have a quarter horse operation. So we have about a hundred horses. We run about a 65 to 75 mare brood band and have about six stallions. So that's kind of our ranch side. Wow. That's a lot.

04:02
Yes. Yeah, it is a larger ranch. as much as I'd love to do the homesteading thing and like have the garden and all the other little animals, we have plenty going on that my husband's always like, no, you don't need to add more to our plate. Yeah, I wish that my husband understood that concept. He's always like, I want to try this. I want to try that. And I'm like, I think we need to get good at the first couple of things before we add more in.

04:30
I know. I really want chickens because I love fresh chicken eggs. And he's just like, just go across to our cousins. They have chickens. Honestly, it's easier if you just get them from somebody else. It really is. um We have 18 chickens and keeping chickens is not hard. I'm not saying don't get chickens. I'm not telling anyone to not ever get chickens because it's not that hard, but you have to make sure that you have bedding in the wintertime. If you live in a winter state, a Northern tier state,

05:00
And you have to clean out their coop at least once a month, if not twice a month in the warmer months because it gets stinky and that's not a fun environment for them to live in. So if you don't want to deal with chicken poop, don't get chickens. Yeah, that's definitely a thing. I have had to babysit the chickens across the way a few times and they are a little bit of work. I think they'd be so fun and my sons, they love the chickens.

05:30
Yeah, I love watching the chickens. I just don't love going in the coop in August when it's been a really hot day and the coop needs to be cleaned. And I have to hold my breath for the whole time and they're getting eggs, you know, it's very stinky. But they are they are gorgeous. Even the most, I don't know, plain Jane chicken like we have, we have the ISA Browns. They're just a reddish brown chicken. They're really pretty, too. So I don't know. Chickens are great, but

06:00
I think that you probably have a very nice setup with your cousins across the way to get eggs from. Yeah. Yeah, it definitely does work. And there's other people in our community that do eggs as well. m I hear one of your kitties in the background. Yeah. Yeah. Whenever I'm at my desk, she has to be right here with me and she is a old girl. So she likes to complain. Does she help you type?

06:26
She would love to sit right on the laptop the entire time if I let her. Something about the warmth of it. Yeah, we don't have any indoor cats anymore, but we have a dog and she barks in the background. Probably one out of every three recordings I do. And sometimes I edit her out and other times just leave her in because we live on a homestead. There's going to be animal noises. Oh no. Yeah, exactly. I have my dogs right beside me too. And if she heard a noise that sounded like a knock,

06:54
She would be extremely loud. huh. Yeah. Maggie's like that too. The trash truck pulls in the driveway and she loses her mind for the entire time. I'm like, you know, even if you caught the truck, there was, there's not anything you could do about it. So just stop and she won't until it pulls out of the driveway. She will not stop barking. And as it's pulling out of the driveway, she does this raw, raw, raw, like, yeah, get out of here. Exactly. sounds. m

07:24
It's very, very funny. So, um tell me how you got into this marketing thing, because I looked at your website and I know the story, but the listener doesn't know the story. Okay. So, um I originally got into it by doing it for the ranch. So, my husband is a fourth generation rancher and we have the Quarter Horse Program, which is where it mainly started and

07:51
They always sold locally and by word of mouth, they got it out and kind of were selling their horses for the last, they started in like the mid 1900s. So it's been a long family operation. And in, you know, 2012, 2014 ish when Facebook came out, we started using Facebook to market the horses. And that's kind of when the program blew up.

08:20
We don't do any modern day bloodlines. We don't show our quarter horses. They're just ranch bred horses. And when we were able to show them off online using social media and the internet and a website and all the things, um we started selling them all across the U S and now we have even started selling them overseas.

08:45
And when I was working for the farm service agency, before I had my, well, up until right after I had my son, I was always talking with the farmers, the ranchers, the stay at home ranch wives that had smaller businesses or the little businesses in town. And they always struggled to market their stuff.

09:11
like further than just going to the local elevator or the local sale barn or just farmers markets and things like that, especially in such a small rural community where we live. And it was hard to, for them to make side hustles or side businesses really work in such a small community. And they just, you know, always were at awe. Like, how do you guys sell your horses? You know, so

09:39
to so many states and now you've even shipped them overseas or how are you getting your cattle to be hitting the top of the sale barns every time you guys bring them to the sale barn and most of the time we sell right off the ranch private treaty because we're able to market and get a good deal where we ...