Black Dog Ranch — BDR, LLC — started on 10 acres near Fort Gibson, Oklahoma. What began as a homestead is growing into a working ranch, with a second 11.63-acre property about five miles away currently being converted into pasture and farmland for the years ahead. Between the two properties, we're working with 21.63 acres and counting.
We're building this deliberately and in the open. Some pieces — like BDR Farm Management, the software program built by CloudDelta, LLC, our family's software company — are ready today. Others, like our registered St. Croix sheep breeding program and high-end lamb, are multi-year builds that we're working toward step by step. Our pasture egg flock sits somewhere in between: closer, but still coming together.
St. Croix are a hair sheep breed — no shearing, strong parasite resistance, and a reputation for easy lambing and excellent meat quality. They're well suited to Oklahoma's climate and to a homestead-scale operation that's growing toward something bigger. Our long-term goal is a registered breeding program alongside a high-end lamb program, but that takes years of careful selection and infrastructure — we're not cutting that corner.
Running a homestead means tracking a lot: animals, health records, breeding, feed, expenses, sales, crops, equipment. We looked at what was out there and didn't find software that fit how an actual working farm operates, so our family built our own through CloudDelta, LLC, our software company. It's now in beta, and we're looking for other farms to test it alongside us.
Our home base — where the family lives and where the day-to-day of the ranch currently happens.
A second property about five miles away, being converted into working farmland and pasture to support the growing sheep program in the years ahead.