That Western Life

In this episode of That Western Life, Katie sits down with Tyler Schuster for a conversation about cattle, leadership, relationships, personal branding, and the invisible infrastructure that keeps people connected to agriculture.

A fifth-generation cattle producer from Brackettville, Texas, Tyler's career has moved through agricultural development, university leadership, cattle-industry programs, speaking, podcasting, fundraising, and work supporting emerging professionals. Her career may look broad on paper, but there is a clear thread running through it: helping people find their place, build meaningful relationships, and navigate an industry that can sometimes feel difficult to enter from the outside.

Katie and Tyler talk about the importance of institutional fluency — knowing how to walk into a room, understand who makes decisions, build relationships, and advocate for an idea. They explore the difference between simply knowing people and building real relationship capital, why fundraising is ultimately about trust, and how young professionals can become more intentional about the networks they create.

Tyler also shares the thinking behind her podcast Basically Famous, her work highlighting women in agriculture and the Western lifestyle, and why personal branding does not have to mean manufacturing a version of yourself for social media.

This is an episode about far more than networking.

It is about belonging.

It is about understanding how industries actually work.

And it is about creating pathways that make agriculture stronger for the people coming next.

Learn more about Tyler on her Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok.

Learn more about Brands & Blazers HERE.

Stay Connected with That Western Life

Subscribe to That Western Life for thoughtful conversations about rodeo, agriculture, ranching, Western business and culture—and the people shaping the future of the Western industry.

Explore more from That Western Life:

• Website & Show Notes

• Join the Newsletter

• Instagram

• Facebook

• TikTok

• Pinterest

• YouTube

Listen and subscribe:

• Apple Podcasts

• Spotify

• Podcast RSS Feed

If you enjoyed this episode, follow the show, leave a rating or review, and share it with someone who cares about the future of the Western way of life.

In this episode of That Western Life, Katie sits down with Rizpah Bellard, founder of Nova Farming, for a conversation that stretches far beyond cattle.

Raised on a Black Angus ranch in Northern California, Rizpah has built a career at the intersection of agriculture, education, public health, housing, community development, and food access. Through Nova Farming, she works to close the gap between people and their food system, especially for students and underserved communities who may not otherwise see agriculture as a career path, business opportunity, or source of connection.

Rizpah shares how her upbringing shaped her understanding of land, livestock, and responsibility; how her work in anti-trafficking, housing, and marginalized communities informs the way she approaches agriculture; and why she believes community leadership starts before a title is ever attached to your name.

This episode explores agriculture as more than production. It is about access, exposure, succession planning, education, food systems, representation, and what it means to use what you have been given to build opportunity for others.

Make sure to learn more at Nova Farming & to connect with Rizpah on LinkedIn.

That Western Life is officially back, but what actually worked?

Katie, Kaycie and Taylie unpack the first month of the Season 7 relaunch, including unexpected social growth, 17 new leads, the content that sparked conversation and the lessons western businesses can apply to their own marketing.

The biggest takeaway? Getting attention is only the beginning. The real challenge is turning it into an audience—and building a system capable of sustaining the growth.

From social growth and podcast downloads to content strategy, audience behavior and 17 new leads, the team shares what they learned about rebuilding a dormant brand, creating content that earns attention and building systems that can sustain growth. Plus, practical takeaways for rodeos, ranches, associations and western creators looking to strengthen their own digital presence.

Core Takeaways

• Operational capacity precedes sustainable growth. A successful content strategy eventually becomes an operations problem, not merely a creative one.
• Reach and followers measure different things. Modern distribution allows small accounts to reach large audiences; the harder challenge is converting borrowed attention into an owned community.
• Content libraries are business assets. Rodeos, ranches and associations should capture reusable photography and video before spending heavily to advertise thin or outdated feeds.
• Disagreement reveals audience structure. Thoughtful controversial conversations can expose generational, cultural and professional divides that deserve deeper coverage.
• Search behavior is strategic intelligence. Evergreen questions such as how the PRCA circuit system works reveal durable information gaps the western industry can own.
• Leads matter more than vanity metrics. Seventeen inbound opportunities offered stronger evidence of commercial relevance than follower growth alone.
• Growth does not require immediate monetization. Building audience density and repeatable systems before aggressively selling sponsorship may create more valuable inventory later.
• Professional resilience requires uneven skills to be strengthened. Careers increasingly reward portfolios of capabilities and networks containing both mentors and sponsors.
• The next measurement problem is conversion. July proved the brand could earn attention. The more important question is whether August can turn that attention into habit, trust and durable business value.

Interested in hiring our digital media team? Send us an email at [email protected] to check for pricing and availability.

Read more at https://www.thatwesternlife.com/podcast/episode133

In this episode of That Western Life, Katie Schrock speaks with Dr. Emily Melchior, a cattle scientist, Zoetis outcomes research lead for ruminants and equine, and Cowgirl 30 Under 30 honoree. Her work sits at the intersection of animal health, applied data science, and the increasingly global economics of livestock production.

Melchior's trajectory—from a horse-focused upbringing in suburban America to a PhD in animal science at New Mexico State University—offers a case study in how modern agricultural expertise is formed: not only through traditional production experience, but through formal scientific training, statistical rigor, and exposure to global production systems.

Today, she works on outcomes research that evaluates how interventions in cattle and equine health translate into measurable results for producers, veterinarians, and broader supply chains. The conversation highlights a central tension in contemporary livestock systems: the need to balance scientific innovation with on-the-ground practicality.

What This Episode Covers

• The role of early animal affinity and FFA in shaping agricultural career pathways

• The academic and applied focus of a PhD in animal science at New Mexico State University

• The integration of range cow-calf nutrition, herd health, vaccination strategy, and calf development into system-level outcomes

• The function of outcomes research in translating veterinary and nutritional interventions into producer-relevant metrics

• The often underappreciated empirical knowledge embedded in cattle producers' decision-making around land, nutrition, and animal health

• The constraint that innovation in livestock health must remain operationally viable, not merely technologically advanced

• Structural differences in livestock production systems across the United States, Europe, Brazil, and other major markets

• The convergence of sustainability metrics, genomics, productivity, and emissions accounting in modern dairy and beef research

• The growing demand for interdisciplinary fluency among the next generation of producers, veterinarians, and agricultural communicators

Subscribe to That Western Life for conversations about rodeo, agriculture, ranching, western culture, western business, country lifestyle, and the people shaping the future of the industry.

CONNECT:

Website | Join the Newsletter

FOLLOW ALONG:

Instagram | Facebook | TikTok | Pinterest | YouTube

Listen to the podcast:

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/that-western-life/id1451270471

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4snND5oWIV2Q8hVljbpbYr?si=46b32a0aa07a4cd4

Libsyn: https://feeds.libsyn.com/159374/rss

Western heritage is easy to romanticize.

But behind every legacy brand is a much harder story: ownership decisions, supply chains, skilled labor, production timelines, cash flow, customer trust, and the pressure to protect the name while still moving the business forward.

That is what makes Adam Trenk's role with Genuine Billy Cook Saddles so interesting.

Billy Cook is not just another saddle brand. It carries history, craftsmanship, and deep credibility in the western industry. For generations, the name has meant something to horsemen, ranchers, rodeo competitors, and working cowboys.

Then came the tornado.

In April 2024, the Billy Cook facility was destroyed, forcing the company into one of the most difficult tests a heritage manufacturer can face: how do you rebuild without losing what made the brand matter in the first place?

That is where leadership becomes more than a title.

Rebuilding a western brand is not simply about reopening doors. It is about protecting craft knowledge, honoring the customer base, stabilizing production, retaining credibility, and proving that legacy is not just something you inherit.

It is something you have to earn again.

Adam Trenk's story is a reminder that the future of the western industry will not be built only by new startups or flashy ideas.

It will also be built by the people willing to preserve, repair, modernize, and fight for the businesses that already carry the culture forward.

Subscribe to That Western Life for conversations about rodeo, agriculture, ranching, western culture, western business, country lifestyle, and the people shaping the future of the industry. Read more on the blog HERE.

Follow That Western Life:

Website: https://www.thatwesternlife.com/podcast

Newsletter: https://brazen-night-82723.myflodesk.com/fgxjr0px3o

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thatwesternlife

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thatwesternlife

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/thatwesternlife

Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/thatwesternlife

YouTube: https://youtube.com/@thatwesternlife?si=PRn_o_lDSdkivAcs

Listen to the podcast:

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/that-western-life/id1451270471

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4snND5oWIV2Q8hVljbpbYr?si=46b32a0aa07a4cd4

Libsyn: https://feeds.libsyn.com/159374/rss

Agriculture policy can feel like one of those topics people know they should understand, but quietly avoid.

It sounds complicated. It sounds political. It sounds like something happening far away in Washington, D.C., instead of something connected to the everyday work of ranchers, farmers, rodeo families, landowners, and western communities.

But as Tori Teegarden explains in this episode of That Western Life, agriculture policy is not distant at all.

It affects grazing permits, public lands, water, private property rights, meat processing, food safety, conservation programs, farm and ranch succession, USDA programs, tax policy, and the future of food production in the United States.

In other words, if you care about agriculture, ranching, rodeo, rural communities, or the western way of life, policy already affects you.

Tori Teegarden is an agriculture policy advisor in the office of U.S. Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming. Her work includes agriculture, natural resources, federal lands, ranching, and the issues facing producers across the West. But what makes this conversation especially valuable is that Tori does not approach policy as an abstract government topic. She comes to it with a background in ranching, rodeo, animal science, meat science, and food safety.

Her family has deep ranching ties in Wyoming and Colorado, and her grandmother was Miss Rodeo Wyoming. During COVID-19, Tori worked on the harvest floor of a beef plant, where she saw firsthand how federal regulation affects the food supply chain. That experience helped shape the way she understands policy today: not as paperwork, but as something with real consequences for producers, workers, animals, businesses, and consumers.

One of the strongest themes of the conversation is the difference between policy and politics.

Politics can feel divisive, loud, and exhausting. Policy is the structure underneath daily life. It determines how programs operate, how agencies function, how land and water are managed, and how producers interact with government systems. Tori makes the point that people can avoid political fights while still becoming more informed about the policies that affect their land, livestock, business, and community.

Katie and Tori also talk about how agriculture and natural resource policy are often more bipartisan than people realize. In D.C., the headlines may make it seem like no one works together, but Tori explains that ag and natural resource work often requires practical collaboration. Ranchers, farmers, conservationists, staffers, agencies, and elected officials may not agree on everything, but many are working toward the same larger goals: healthy land, productive agriculture, food security, and strong rural communities.

That is where one of Tori's most powerful points comes in:

Ranchers are the original conservationists.

Ranchers work with land, grass, livestock, water, weather, wildlife, invasive species, and long-term resource health every day. Their livelihood depends on caring for the land. That does not mean every public lands or conservation conversation is simple, but it does mean ranchers belong in those conversations.

For everyday people wondering how to get involved, Tori's advice is direct: start local.

That might mean talking to county commissioners, reaching out to your Extension office, joining a Farm Bureau or cattlemen's association, attending county or state meetings, or calling your elected officials. Tori emphasizes that staffers are real people, and many of them genuinely want to hear from constituents who are dealing with these issues on the ground.

But when you do reach out, be clear. Explain what happened, where it happened, who is affected, what outcome is needed, and whether you have photos, data, or real-life examples that can help explain the issue. A personal story shows impact. A statistic shows scale. A photo can make a problem easier to understand.

The episode also breaks down the Farm Bill in a way that is accessible for listeners who have heard the term but may not fully understand it. Tori explains that the Farm Bill is a large, comprehensive agriculture bill that affects far more than farms. It includes conservation, nutrition, rural development, livestock programs, research, food systems, and more. For western audiences, understanding the Farm Bill matters because it influences many of the programs and policies that shape agriculture, ranching, and rural economies.

Katie and Tori also discuss the next generation of western leaders. Tori is clear that young people need to get involved earlier. The average age of American farmers and ranchers continues to rise, and younger producers cannot afford to sit out of conversations that will affect their future operations, families, and communities.

Her advice is simple: get involved, use the tools available, and keep an open mind.

Technology makes it easier than ever to email representatives, follow Extension updates, read policy summaries, track legislation, and connect with organizations that are already working on these issues. The western industry does not need to abandon tradition, but it does need leaders willing to adapt, ask questions, and understand how policy shapes the future.

When asked what she would change in rodeo, Tori gives an answer that fits the entire episode: she wants a PRCA rodeo in Washington, D.C.

After seeing rodeo-style demonstrations on the National Mall, she believes there is real opportunity to introduce more people to rodeo, livestock, western history, agriculture, and rural culture. Rodeo is more than entertainment. It can be a gateway into larger conversations about land, food, animals, and the western way of life.

Tori closes the episode with a quote she grew up hearing from her dad, often attributed to Albert Einstein:

"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results."

For agriculture and the western industry, that message is timely. If ranchers, producers, and rural leaders want different outcomes, they have to be willing to engage differently.

They have to ask questions. They have to build relationships. They have to speak up before there is a crisis. And they have to understand the systems shaping the land, food, water, and communities they care about.

This episode makes agriculture policy feel less intimidating and more usable. More importantly, it makes the case that the people closest to the land need to be part of the conversations shaping its future.

Listen to the Full Episode

Listen to this episode of That Western Life with Katie Schrock and Tori Teegarden for an approachable conversation about agriculture policy, ranching, public lands, the Farm Bill, food production, rodeo, and how everyday people in the western industry can get involved.

Read more on the website HERE.

Subscribe to That Western Life for conversations about rodeo, agriculture, ranching, western culture, western business, country lifestyle, and the people shaping the future of the industry.

Follow That Western Life:

Website: https://www.thatwesternlife.com/podcast

Newsletter: https://brazen-night-82723.myflodesk.com/fgxjr0px3o

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thatwesternlife

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thatwesternlife

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/thatwesternlife

Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/thatwesternlife

YouTube: https://youtube.com/@thatwesternlife?si=PRn_o_lDSdkivAcs

Listen to the podcast:

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/that-western-life/id1451270471

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4snND5oWIV2Q8hVljbpbYr?si=46b32a0aa07a4cd4

Libsyn: https://feeds.libsyn.com/159374/rss

The Comeback Is Not the Strategy

The first episode of That Western Pulse begins with a confession.

"Are you nosy about other people's business?" asks That Western Life founder and host Katie Schrock. "Because I kind of am."

It is an unusually honest premise for a business program. Most organizations prefer to reveal the polished campaign, the final attendance figure or the celebratory revenue announcement. They rarely publish the abandoned accounts, unfinished systems, missing analytics, awkward baselines or internal debate that came before them.

That Western Life is attempting the opposite.

The twice-monthly That Western Pulse series will examine the internal economics and operating decisions behind rodeo, agriculture, Western events, associations and media. Its first subject is the organization itself: a once-active podcast emerging from roughly two years of dormancy with a new team, a more ambitious publishing operation and a spreadsheet full of publicly stated goals.

The episode introduces Schrock alongside storytellers and strategists Taylie Hammack-Bennett and Kaycie Timm. Together, they outline plans to rebuild the podcast, modernize its brand, increase its digital reach and use both That Western Life and a second, not-yet-disclosed event as live case studies.

On the surface, this is a comeback story.

Underneath it is a more consequential management question:

Can an entrepreneurial media brand become less dependent on the entrepreneur who created it?

When success becomes a capacity problem

That Western Life did not originally go quiet because it had exhausted its subject matter or lost all demand.

Schrock says the podcast helped generate many of the clients, retainers, event assignments and professional relationships that subsequently consumed her available capacity. The platform created opportunities faster than its founder could build the operating structure required to continue publishing it.

That is a peculiar form of success, but not a rare one.

Founder-led businesses often begin with an unusually productive concentration of talent. One person holds the relationships, institutional memory, creative direction, sales instincts, production knowledge and final decision-making authority. This concentration creates speed during the early stages. It also creates fragility.

When every important process passes through one person, growth does not eliminate the bottleneck. It enlarges it.

The founder becomes both the company's most valuable asset and its most restrictive constraint.

In the podcast's earlier form, Schrock was not merely a host. She was also a researcher, producer, scheduler, marketer, strategist, connector and, at times, the final quality-control department. Client work generated by the show competed directly with the work required to produce the show. The better the podcast performed as a business-development engine, the harder it became to maintain as a publishing product.

Its interruption was therefore not simply a content failure. It was an operating-model failure.

The relaunch will succeed only if it changes that model.

A better market—and a noisier one

The timing is favorable.

Podcast consumption in the United States reached new highs in 2026. Edison Research found that 58% of Americans age 12 and older had consumed a podcast during the previous month, while 45% had done so during the previous week. Americans now spend approximately 812 million hours per week with podcasts, up 386% from 2016.

The opportunity is no longer restricted to audio.

Fifty-seven percent of Americans age 12 and older have both listened to and watched a podcast. YouTube reports more than 1 billion monthly active viewers of podcast content and describes itself as the most frequently used podcast-listening service in the United States.

For That Western Life, the decision to add video and revive YouTube is therefore not a decorative expansion. It reflects a structural change in the medium. A podcast is increasingly not an audio file promoted with a few social clips. It is a source product distributed through audio, video, search, newsletters, articles and short-form content.

That distinction matters commercially.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau projected that American creator advertising spending would reach $44 billion in 2026, after rising to an estimated $37 billion in 2025. Nearly half of creator-ad buyers surveyed by IAB considered creators a "must buy," but the same research identified measurement and operational standards as major weaknesses.

The creator economy has become large enough to command real budgets. It has not necessarily become disciplined enough to measure what those budgets purchase.

That Western Pulse is positioning itself inside that gap: part media product, part industry analysis and part public demonstration of what its team can build for others.

That creates opportunity. It also creates an obvious risk. A case study designed partly to attract clients can easily become advertising disguised as analysis.

To remain credible, the series must be willing to publish outcomes that are inconvenient.

The team is the first experiment

The clearest change in the relaunched That Western Life is not its content calendar. It is the composition of the people responsible for fulfilling it.

Hammack-Bennett brings experience as a rodeo competitor, committee participant, photographer and business owner. Her background connects the internal traditions of rodeo with the practical demands of modern event media.

Timm began as a journalist and expanded into photography, video, branding, marketing strategy and coaching. Her role is partly creative and partly diagnostic: she sees gaps between what an organization says it is and how that identity appears in its public assets.

Schrock sits at the center as host, strategist, event producer and organizer. She brings the institutional history, network and commercial context, but the new structure is explicitly designed to prevent every task from remaining hers.

Their geography is notable but not especially troubling. Schrock and Hammack-Bennett are in Oregon; Timm is in Texas. Google's long-running internal study of team effectiveness found that colocation was not among the factors significantly connected with effectiveness in its teams. What mattered more was how people worked together: psychological safety, dependability, role clarity, meaning and a belief that the work had impact.

Those traits are visible throughout the first episode.

The hosts correct one another, acknowledge mistakes, question their own metrics and admit where they do not yet have an answer. Schrock describes sending "accountability updates" when ranch work and early-morning cattle breeding disrupted the publishing schedule. The response from the team was not to ignore the deadline or condemn the imperfection. It was to protect momentum while refining the process.

That may sound modest. It is not.

A functioning creative team does not remove accountability. It makes accountability survivable.

Timm describes the team's philosophy through the familiar idea that "all ships rise." Hammack-Bennett frames the project as an overdue investment in their own intellectual property after years of building businesses, brands and events for other people.

The language is collaborative, but the strategy is economic.

Independent contractors frequently spend their best creative energy increasing the enterprise value of their clients while neglecting their own brands. They build audiences they do not own, archives they cannot reuse and systems that cease to benefit them when the contract ends.

That Western Life offers the team a different kind of asset: a platform whose accumulated value can compound.

A dormant audience is not the same as no audience

The relaunch begins with an advantage unavailable to most new podcasts.

That Western Life already has a name, an archive, search history, industry relationships and residual listening behavior. Schrock reports that old episodes continued to generate downloads during the dormant period, while existing website articles continued attracting search traffic. The podcast also retained approximately 988 active email subscribers and thousands of followers spread across established but largely inactive social accounts.

Dormancy damaged momentum, but it did not erase every asset.

This distinction is central to the case study. A dormant brand is not a blank slate. It is a portfolio of assets in varying condition:

• Some are appreciating, such as evergreen articles that still answer useful questions.
• Some are deteriorating, such as inactive social audiences that gradually unfollow or disengage.
• Some are stranded, such as old episodes that are difficult to discover.
• Some are invisible, such as reputation, relationships and audience memory.
• Some are liabilities, including outdated branding, broken systems and unreliable historical data.

The managerial task is not merely to "start posting again." It is to identify which assets retain value, which require repair and which should be abandoned.

Google's current Search guidance reinforces the potential value of the article archive. The company advises publishers to create original, non-commodity material that satisfies real reader needs and to evaluate the quality of visits through outcomes such as engagement, sales and signups—not clicks alone.

That is particularly relevant for a niche publication.

That Western Life does not need to outpublish general-interest media. It needs to produce material about Western business, rodeo operations, agricultural communications and event economics that broader publishers cannot easily replicate.

Its advantage is not volume. It is proximity.

The numbers reveal the real hypothesis

The team's July targets initially appear inconsistent.

Follower goals are cautious. Reach goals are audacious.

Facebook followers were expected to move from 4,269 to 4,275—an increase of six. Instagram's target represented growth of only 45 followers. The email list needed 12 additional active subscribers to reach 1,000.

By contrast, the team wanted website visitors to rise from 274 to 1,000. Facebook views were expected to increase from 316 to 10,000. Instagram views were targeted to rise from approximately 1,100 to 50,000. TikTok views were expected to move from ten to 1,000.

By the Numbers Metric Baseline July Goal Required Growth Lifetime podcast downloads 115,700 116,450 0.6% Website visitors 274 1,000 265% Facebook views 316 10,000 3,065% Instagram views 1,100 50,000 4,445% TikTok views 10 1,000 9,900% Email subscribers 988 1,000 1.2%

The percentages are spectacular partly because the starting figures are so small. Increasing TikTok views by 9,900% sounds like hypergrowth; in absolute terms, it requires 990 additional views.

That does not make the goal meaningless. It does make the percentage less informative than it first appears.

Still, the contrast between the two categories reveals a coherent strategic bet:

The team is not expecting immediate audience accumulation. It is testing whether regular publishing can restore distribution.

That is a sensible first-stage objective. A dormant account must begin reaching people again before it can reliably convert them into followers, subscribers, listeners or customers.

But reach is only evidence of distribution. It is not evidence of loyalty, commercial intent or a healthy business.

One successful Reel could carry Instagram past its monthly goal without persuading a single person to listen to a full episode. An old article could produce thousands of search visits without generating a meaningful inquiry. A controversial clip could create awareness while weakening the brand among the audience it hopes to serve.

The next stage of measurement must therefore move beyond raw visibility.

Downloads are not listeners, and leads are not revenue

The episode is most useful when its hosts question their own statistics.

At one point, the team realizes that its proposed "downloads in the first 30 days" measurement cannot be judged at the end of the calendar month because several episodes will not yet have been available for 30 days. Elsewhere, Schrock discovers that some early podcast episodes had expired from the hosting platform, complicating the historical download total.

These are not trivial administrative errors. They illustrate one of the creator economy's central problems: dashboards make measurement look more settled than it is.

A delivered audio file is not identical to a person listening attentively. Edison distinguishes its listening-based podcast measurement from download analytics for precisely that reason.

A social view is not a completed video.

A follower is not a customer.

A lead is not revenue.

Timm states the distinction particularly well:

"A lead does not in fact generate revenue. However, you will never generate revenue without leads."

The solution is not to discard top-of-funnel metrics. It is to connect them.

For That Western Life, the more revealing scorecard will eventually include:

• Returning website visitors
• Episode consumption or completion
• Newsletter conversion rates
• Replies and substantive audience questions
• Qualified commercial inquiries
• Partnerships created
• Revenue influenced
• Production hours per published episode
• Content reuse across platforms
• The percentage of the operation that can continue without Schrock's direct intervention

The final metric may be the most important.

If reach increases but the founder remains the point through which every decision, document and deadline must pass, the relaunch will have rebuilt the audience without repairing the company.

The second case study will test the proposition

The team is also applying its model to a Western event that had not been publicly identified when the episode was recorded.

Few details are disclosed, but the stated experiment is clear. The group intends to assemble a creative and strategic team around an event, document the work, track the results and examine what coordinated media coverage can accomplish—even when the event does not possess an extravagant promotional budget.

This is where That Western Pulse could become more valuable than an ordinary behind-the-scenes podcast.

Western events frequently evaluate media as an expense attached to the event rather than an asset created by it. The immediate question becomes how many posts, photographs or videos can be purchased within the available budget.

A more useful question is what those assets must accomplish.

They may need to sell tickets this year. They may also need to prove sponsor fulfillment, recruit volunteers, improve future sponsorship proposals, build an archive, attract competitors, support public relations and preserve the identity of the event for the community that owns it.

A photograph can be a record.

A strategically commissioned photograph can also be sales collateral, sponsor evidence, editorial material, recruitment creative and part of the event's long-term intellectual property.

The difference lies less in the camera than in the brief.

The undisclosed event will therefore test more than the team's ability to produce attractive media. It will test whether planning, assignments, distribution and measurement can increase the commercial utility of creative work.

The result should not be judged only by aggregate views. It should be judged by what the event can do after the views have passed.

The Western industry's hidden operating problem

Rodeo, agriculture and the wider Western economy contain no shortage of ambitious people.

They do contain many organizations attempting to run increasingly sophisticated enterprises through structures built for a simpler era.

Volunteer committees now oversee events with national broadcasts, complex sponsorship agreements, ticketing systems, digital audiences, crisis risks and year-round content demands. Small businesses are expected to communicate across half a dozen platforms while also delivering the product or service that generates their revenue. Contractors are asked to create strategy, capture content, publish it and report results—sometimes without access to the information required to do any of those tasks well.

The resulting problem is often misdiagnosed as a lack of ideas.

It is more commonly a lack of operating capacity.

The hosts repeatedly return to a philosophy of taking the "middle-school sleepover dreams"—the ideas people discuss enthusiastically and then postpone—and converting them into assignments, documents, deadlines and measurable experiments.

That translation is management.

Inspiration may begin a project. Systems allow it to survive its inspiring founder.

The public spreadsheet may be the most important product

That Western Pulse is being introduced as a business feature about the Western lifestyle. Its first season may also become an examination of whether transparency can function as both editorial value and organizational discipline.

Publishing a goal changes the nature of the goal.

It invites scrutiny. It prevents the team from quietly redefining success after the result is known. It also creates an editorial reason to return, analyze and improve.

The project should resist the temptation to make every update triumphant.

The most useful future episode may be the one in which a platform remains stagnant, a campaign fails to convert or the workload proves unsustainable. A credible case study does not merely report what worked. It identifies the assumption that failed and explains what changed as a result.

The same standard should apply to the event case study.

If the media team produces significant reach but little measurable value for the event, the series should say so. If volunteer coordination creates friction, it should examine the structure rather than hiding it. If one channel performs far better than expected, the team should determine whether the result can be repeated or was simply an outlier.

That is how the series can separate itself from the large supply of business content built around retrospective certainty.

The hosts do not yet know whether all the goals will be met. They do not know exactly how the partnerships, sponsorships or lead pipeline will develop. Some of the original measurements need refinement. The operational structure is still being built while the work is already moving through it.

That uncertainty is not a weakness in the story.

It is the story.

What happens next

That Western Life is attempting two related experiments.

The first asks whether an established but dormant media brand can restore momentum through disciplined publishing, better distribution and a team built around complementary abilities.

The second asks whether that team can apply the same principles to an outside Western event and produce value that extends beyond attractive content and temporary attention.

Both experiments will ultimately turn on the same issue.

The Western industry does not need more people telling it that storytelling matters. It needs clearer evidence of what good storytelling accomplishes, what it costs, how it should be organized and which business outcomes it can reasonably influence.

The comeback is useful.

The operating system behind it will determine whether it lasts.

On this episode of That Western Life, Katie sits down with Alex Russell, a small-town farm kid, former rodeo competitor, FFA leader, agriculture professional, and one of the highest-energy voices working at the intersection of agriculture and the western lifestyle.

Alex grew up in South Central Illinois surrounded by horses, rodeo, farming, and the kind of rural upbringing that shaped her work ethic, confidence, and curiosity. Today, she works in agriculture with Syngenta, where her career has moved from sales internships to field sales, sales training, leadership development, and now national soybean seed care product strategy.

This conversation explores what it really looks like to build a career in agriculture, why FFA can change the direction of a young person's life, how rodeo and farming overlap more than people realize, and why the western industry needs to talk honestly about both tradition and innovation.

Katie and Alex also discuss mentorship, sponsorship, corporate agriculture, women in leadership, remote career growth, food production, consumer trust, and the importance of showing up as a better version of yourself each day.

Subscribe to That Western Life for conversations about rodeo, agriculture, ranching, western culture, western business, country lifestyle, and the people shaping the future of the industry.

Follow That Western Life:

Website: https://www.thatwesternlife.com/podcast

Newsletter: https://brazen-night-82723.myflodesk.com/fgxjr0px3o

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thatwesternlife

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thatwesternlife

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/thatwesternlife

Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/thatwesternlife

YouTube: https://youtube.com/@thatwesternlife?si=PRn_o_lDSdkivAcs

Listen to the podcast:

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/that-western-life/id1451270471

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4snND5oWIV2Q8hVljbpbYr?si=46b32a0aa07a4cd4

Libsyn: https://feeds.libsyn.com/159374/rss

In this episode, Jesse Jarvis shares her journey through the Western industry, the evolution of her platform Of the West, and insights on industry hiring, branding, and professional growth. We explore how to attract talent, the importance of personal branding, and navigating industry challenges. In this episode, Jessie Jarvis shares insights on career development, industry trust, and the future of agriculture and rodeo, emphasizing the importance of authenticity, data-driven impact, and industry unity.

Subscribe to That Western Life for conversations about rodeo, agriculture, ranching, western culture, western business, country lifestyle, and the people shaping the future of the industry.

Follow That Western Life:

Website: https://www.thatwesternlife.com/podcast

Newsletter: https://brazen-night-82723.myflodesk.com/fgxjr0px3o

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thatwesternlife

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thatwesternlife

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/thatwesternlife

Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/thatwesternlife

YouTube: https://youtube.com/@thatwesternlife?si=PRn_o_lDSdkivAcs

Listen to the podcast:

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/that-western-life/id1451270471

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4snND5oWIV2Q8hVljbpbYr?si=46b32a0aa07a4cd4

Libsyn: https://feeds.libsyn.com/159374/rss