We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Miranda Lamb a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Miranda, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. One deeply underappreciated facet of being an entrepreneur or creative is the kind of crazy stuff that happens from time to time. It could be anything from a disgruntled client attacking an employee or waking up to find out a celebrity gave you a shoutout on TikTok – the sudden, unexpected hits (both positive and negative) make the profession both exhilarating and exhausting. Can you share one of your craziest stories?
We were moving in one month and still had no water to our new farmhouse and cattle business!
In 2017, after a major health scare, I decided to finally start writing, as becoming a writer was a lifelong dream of mine. So I created The Reluctant Cowgirl, a blog that eventually focused on parenting tips for moms of tweens and teens. Meanwhile, my husband, a country boy, through and through, started buying more cows! Then in 2019, I decided to apply all that I had been learning about creating content for The Reluctant Cowgirl blog, to our freezer beef cattle business, Hickory Hollow Farm. I created a Facebook page and started cooking on Facebook live, sharing simple family meals using our freezer beef. And I was surprised at the rapid growth and interest in our country life. When 2020 hit, and the stores were empty of meat, our freezer beef business exploded!
By 2021, we started looking for a much bigger farm for our cattle business. Due to high land prices, even in our small town, we realized that we either had to scale back our business to keep it sustainable or take a leap and move elsewhere. We found affordable land two hours away, in another state! Once the barn was built, we turned our attention to building our farmhouse.
Almost immediately, one of our neighbors started causing problems. They would block the gravel road that led to our house so workers couldn’t get back to our house. Sometimes, they would tell our workers they shouldn’t be there. But the main problem was that they would not allow the local water company to connect the water line under the one portion of the road we shared. In essence, we had half a house already built that had no water.
Months went by, with us trying to just be neighborly, hoping our neighbors would calm down and rethink their decision. After that didn’t work, we paid to have three well holes dug, only to have them all be dry. Meanwhile, the home we were renting, while our new home was being built, was bought by a different landlord, who wanted us out immediately! We were spending every weekend moving farm equipment and building our new farmhouse, only to come home to eviction notices. The stress was overwhelming! We were working 7 days a week, every week, going as fast as possible to vacate our rental property. But we still had no water at our new farmhouse. And our last option to get water was a crazy one!!
We would have to attempt to dig one mile across the entire farm to connect into the water at our other farm entrance. My husband, and his good friend, had never done anything like this. They weren’t even sure it would work. But we had no other choice. Either our business would massively fail with no water for our cattle or us, or we would have to try. After two weeks of digging, we turned on the water at the other entrance. And we waited. Five minutes went by, then 10 minutes. Finally at 15 minutes, water roared out of the pipe!! We had water!
Miranda, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
I am Miranda, a city girl married to a country boy. We have three children, two grown and one still at home. In 2017, I created The Reluctant Cowgirl blog. After years teaching court groups, for parents and teens, that struggle with truancy issues, I decided to share what I had learned. The Reluctant Cowgirl is all about raising responsible and resilient teens that are ready to launch when they leave home. I love encouraging moms to set healthy boundaries in their home. Moms discover they can spend less time nagging their teens and more time enjoying the interesting teenage years! Writing my book, Responsible and Resilient Teens: 10 Secret Parenting Solutions That Work, was a lifelong goal come true. And I love that parents of teens now have a framework on how to treasure the teenage year, while still providing healthy boundaries and structure in the home.
Together, my husband and I also own Hickory Hollow Farm. We raise Angus cattle that we sell locally for freezer beef. I really enjoy interacting with our customers, creating social media content, posting recipes, and sharing about our adventures in farming. But as I am definitely a city girl, hence the name, The Reluctant Cowgirl, there are often mishaps and some hilarious misunderstandings, as I try to work around the farm. So Hickory Hollow Farm is partly about country life and raising cattle and partly the humorous viewpoint of one girl, who is clearly more comfortable in the kitchen, than on the farm!
Providing pasture-raised, grain-finished beef to local families is what I am most proud of as part of our business. And as we care about our cattle, it is important that we take care of them in the best way. One unique aspect to our cattle business is that we raise the majority of our cattle from birth. We can give our cattle the best life and our customers the best beef. And we raise our own hay for winter feeding, plus our own corn for grain.
Have you ever had to pivot?
Nothing we choose to learn is ever wasted!
Pivoting from using what I learned to create my first blog to growing our cattle business was instrumental. The Reluctant Cowgirl was my passion and my first love. The blog grew very slowly because I was learning so much. I went from someone who didn’t really like tech to learning a lot of tech. And I didn’t have much of a budget, so it was slow growing. After about 4 years, my website views started really taking off. But that was also the year our beef business started doing well.
As our farm business was a love of my husband’s, I wanted to see what would happen if I started applying what I had learned about creating content to Hickory Hollow Farm. And our cattle business boomed, due to the times we were living in, my husband’s big vision, and my four years of experience “practicing” over on my other blog.
It has been hard to balance everything, and to move more of my focus to Hickory Hollow Farm’s website and social media. But we sell out of beef every year and have been able to purchase our dream legacy farm. We get to provide food for families, live in a beautiful area in the country, and build a business that can be passed onto our children to later build upon.
Can you talk to us about how you funded your business?
Build your network and utilize what you have! We built our cattle business by renting some of the land. We always try to take care of the pastures by mending fences and keeping the land mowed and looking good. But we also care for the people and other farmers. If a fellow farming family is sick, we take meals or stop to visit. We take the time to talk and listen. This has paid off huge in the amount of additional opportunities that have come our way. And we also try to take excellent care of our customers by providing quick responses and an excellent product.
Secondly, starting a business doesn’t look pretty, but most of the time it doesn’t need to. One of the first trucks we used for our business was a dump truck. We got a deal while building our previous home. And we just kept using the truck because it was what we had, and it fit the budget. But there were a few times we would be going down the highway, cattle loaded in the trailer hitched to the old truck, wondering if the truck was going to make it to the next pasture! Thankfully, we have a couple trucks now, but we still use what we have til we can pay for something better!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://hickoryhollowfarmbeef.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hickoryhollowfarmgirl/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/hickoryhollowfarmbeef
- Other: You can also find me on The Reluctant Cowgirl at https://thereluctantcowgirl.com/ and on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/thereluctantcowgirl/ . And my book, Responsible and Resilient Teens: 10 Secret Parenting Solutions That Work is available on Amazon
Image Credits
Samantha Love