One Ranch Family’s Invention Journey Led to an Innovative Solution for People Across the Globe with Shondah Otwell

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Welcome to Winds of Change. I am your host, Emmy de Grappa. Winds of Change is brought to you by Wyoming Humanities Council. Wyoming Humanities Council is committed to sharing the stories of the people, places and history of Wyoming. In this special series, we are talking to Wyoming entrepreneurs and innovators.         

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And today my special guest is Shondah Otwell. Shondah is a fourth-generation family rancher in a shoto Wyoming. She and her husband Randall developed an innovative solution for their stock tanks called the Water Rippler. I am looking forward to hearing about her passion and journey as a rancher and now as an entrepreneur. Welcome, Shondah.         

00:00:46

             

Thank you. Well, fourth generation. So where was your family originally from before you established your ranch in Oshoto.         

00:00:56

             

Yes, ma’am. Okay. Sorry. Yes, ma’am. My great grandfather actually came out and I believe it was from Iowa as a really young boy.         

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As a teenage boy, he traveled and ended up in South Dakota and then eventually found his way down to northeast Wyoming working on ranches and so forth, where he met my great grandmother. And she was actually born in the New Haven area. So my family’s been in Crick county for an extremely long time. And then kind of through the years they worked on different places and so forth and eventually put together our family ranch in the late 1930s. And so that’s kind of where it was established at and then it’s just passed down through the generations to us.         

00:01:46

             

Okay, so what happens on your ranch? What are you raising? And we’re cattle producers. We’re a cow calf operation and we develop red heifers. That’s the kind of the second product that we sell.         

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Instead of selling the heifer calves, we go ahead and raise them and really work on our maternal genetics and sell them as bred heifers. So both the cow calf operation and then the bread heifers. So what is it like growing up on a ranch? I actually didn’t grow up on the ranch. I grew up in the community and my grandparents operated it at the time, you know, and so it’s really a unique way of life, if you will.         

00:02:27

             

It’s a lot of hard work, lot of lot of hours, but it’s a very rewarding. I like to live close to the land, care for the animals, care for the land. There is a lot of good benefits to doing that very clean way of life, if you will. But it is not an easy way of life. There’s so many things outside of your control if you’re in the ranching industry.         

00:02:54

             

Everything from weather related factors that we have no Control over to political factors and market factors. And it seems like you’re, you’re always working against something. But if you like ranching, it’s kind of in your blood, I guess you would say, you know, it’s something that you don’t do if you’re only lukewarm about it because it’s a very physically hard and mentally challenging career. Well, I think that’s why people find it so curious, you know what I mean? Yep.         

00:03:26

             

A lot of people and it doesn’t matter where we go and travel at. If they, if they learn that we have a ranch, there is a never ending set of questions. Ranches are very romanticized by a lot of people, you know, because it is. Well, it’s, it’s where everybody basically started at, right? I mean, we all started from homesteads back settling the land, but the great majority of generations have gotten away from that.         

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And so now we see a movement back kind of towards living off the land again in homesteaders and that. But for a lot of generations we got removed from the ranches. And so yeah, it is, it is a romanticized occupation, if you will. And we do. We find people absolutely fascinated and we’re really happy to share with them because we realize we’re one of a small percentage anymore that actually have a family ranching operation.         

00:04:22

             

You know, a lot of ranches have gone to corporate scale because that’s what makes them successful, the economies of scale. The American family ranch is honestly kind of a quickly dying breed. Just it’s the aging population of the ranch community and the hard way of life and the expenses of trying to operate on a very small scale. It’s a dying occupation, in fact. That’s sad.         

00:04:47

             

That’s sad to hear. It is, but that’s the reality. And we face things kind of from a business standpoint and a very straightforward standpoint. We love it, we came back to it and work it with all of the dedication and devotion we can. But we also understand from the business act aspect because both my husband and I had full time careers for more than 20 years before coming back to the ranch.         

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And so that’s something that gives us a little unique perspective and we fully believe allowed us to be in the right situation when we had this innovative idea and design to take it to the next level. Because we had backgrounds that were a little bit more diverse to figure out how you get an idea from a concept that you’re just knowing that something needs to be done to. How are you going to get it marketed to the rest of the agricultural community. And without the backgrounds that both my husband had in the electrical field and I had in the business industry, I don’t know that we would have been capable of launching our product ultimately, like. We’Ve been able to do.         

00:06:00

             

Tell us about your product and tell us, tell us the name of it and what it does and then how that became an idea for you on this journey. Sure. Let me give you just kind of a little bit of a rundown of what we’ve done. As fourth generation ranchers, we were very frustrated dealing with winter ice for our stock. And we knew that we needed to come up with a better solution.         

00:06:27

             

When you’re feeding animals dry feed sources like you do in the winter, they need access to good drinking water. And so what we’ve designed is a device that sits at the surface of livestock watering tanks and it continuously circulates the water. It floats up and down with the water level continuously moving that water, which helps mitigate ice during the winter months. And during the summer months, it helps manage algae growth and it helps control insects like mosquitoes won’t lay their larvae on moving water. And so it’s a multi season thing.         

00:07:04

             

We did it because we were tired of dealing with ice in the stock tanks. And really we had a few economical solutions available to us. There are all sorts of solutions out there that you can do geothermal or you can do, you know, big propane stock tank heaters and that a lot of those are for a lot larger facilities, if you will. And also when you do geothermal, it’s at one location. So what we were trying to use for our own ranch is electric stock tank heaters, or we were physically just going out with an ax and removing the ice from the water.         

00:07:42

             

Those were kind of our two options. And sometimes you had to do both because in real severe temperatures, even when you do have an electric stock tank heater in, think of it like a heating element in your water heater that’s in your house. Right. You’re now dropping it into the elements outside, it’s very cold out and it’s trying to run. So it’s just heating the water right around where it is.         

00:08:08

             

They get calcification buildup. They’re expensive to operate. In our area in northeast Wyoming, when we were running them, they were costing us about $3.39 a day per stock tank heater. We have probably four tanks running at any given moment throughout the winter. And a lot of times in Oshota, Wyoming, we’re running those about five months out of the year.         

00:08:32

             

So when you consider one stock tank for one month costs you just over $100, you can see how the meter starts spinning very quickly. So my husband, like I said, is a master electrician. And he’s like, there has got to be, number one, a better way to do this because these don’t work well when it gets really cold. Number two, there has to be a much more economical way that isn’t as physical as having to go out and continually chop ice. I watched my dad, my grandfather, my husband, all battle that I have stood countless hours myself at frozen stock tanks, chipping away at the ice and pitchforking it out.         

00:09:10

             

So those are the reasons we kind of started developing something is just saying, this is crazy. We’ve got to find something that works, works well, and that is a lot more cost effective for us. And so my husband started playing with different things basically in the shop and just started looking at some ideas, looking at things in nature of how they worked and how water stayed open there. And then, you know, how could we replicate that? What could we do?         

00:09:39

             

And it took a lot of trying. We started this basically in early 2019 of just, there’s got to be a better way. And I mean, now and then he. Will pull the boxes out of the. Attic and lay them on the shop bench and walk people through some of the early prototypes.         

00:09:57

             

And people are like, how did you. Get this from where you started at? Because, I mean, yeah, you can see a few similarities, but the prototypes have changed dramatically over the years of what we’ve tried. And, and prior to even trying the prototypes, we tried everything else we could think of on the market. Like could we do fountains that were designed for ponds?         

00:10:18

             

And how would that work? Well, when animals eat during the winter months, right, they’ve got hay in their mouth and they aren’t necessarily going to swallow everything and then they go get a drink and at play clogs everything up because the debris is on the bottom of your tank. And so there’s just a lot of things you have to think about. You. It had to stay with the surface of the water so it didn’t freeze.         

00:10:38

             

Like, you couldn’t have it suspended somewhere because then when the animals drink and the water levels go down, then it’s suspended and it freezes and there’s just all these variables. So when we started really working, there were times, I’ll be honest, we parked this for months at a time on a shelf and said, you know what, it’s just not going to work. And then we get a really another Big cold snap. And we were frustrated and we’d dig it back out and we’d have a few new design ideas and we put it back together. And then it was a really, really cold morning in 20, 22, 1 February morning, well below 20 below zero.         

00:11:15

             

So, I mean, it was a cold morning. It had been cold for a lot of days. Yeah. And in one stock tank or in a couple stock tanks, honestly, we had electric stock tank heaters. And then we had our ranch made prototype running in one stock tank as well.         

00:11:34

             

You could hear when we pulled up the water actually moving under the ice in that stock tank. And we’d already been to stock tank heaters that we knew were frozen in solid. You had the whole heater covered in ice. You got it chopped out. There was a little hole that the cows could, you know, access just right around it.         

00:11:53

             

But the further you got away from that heater, the thicker that ice got. When we got over to the one where the water rippler was, like I said, you could hear the water bubbling under the ice a lot like when a river freezes over. Because let’s be honest, we’re in Wyoming. Rivers are going to freeze when it gets that cold. Everything’s going to freeze when it gets that cold.         

00:12:13

             

We did have a cap of ice over the water rippler, but the difference was the whole surface of the stock tank underneath the ice was still moving free. And when you got through that little. Surface cap of ice, it was easy. To open the whole tank. All the cows could get around it and the water was just moving away.         

00:12:37

             

And then you could see as the day progresses, that water starts freezing back solid, you know, covering when it’s 20 below and you’ve got your windshield. But it took a lot longer for that ice cap to build up when the water’s continuously moving instead of on the stock tank heaters where it was just heating that little spot right around it. So we’re like, you know what, this is cool. I actually looked at Randall and I said, you know, this would benefit others. And he’s like, what?         

00:13:06

             

And I said, yeah, this needs to be done for others, not just, I know we’re going to use them on our ranch. And I said, but it’s, it’s a neat concept. We knew it was costing us $3.39 a day to run the stock tank heater. We also knew our electrical calculations told us that one cost us 11 cents a day to run that one. So a 97% cost savings.         

00:13:32

             

And it was actually working. It was moving and keeping the water open under that thin layer of ice. Now, since then, we’ve done a ton of testing and wintertime, you know, videos of it and so forth, down to zero degrees. You’ll have open spots of water because we have four ports that that water comes out and those stay open. The cows at zero can go and just drink right where that’s at.         

00:13:59

             

Some of your tank might get a little layer of ice on it between where the channels are moving, if you will. But the cows can just push through that. You start getting down to that 5, 10, 15 below. You might have that small ice cap, but it’s very minimal to get through. And then you’ve got the moving water.         

00:14:18

             

And so that’s really when we knew we had that. We’re like, okay, we need to figure out, we know nothing about what you now take this cool design that we’ve. Been given, figured out how to make it work. How do we then like take it from this and get it to other people in agriculture that they can use it to. And that’s where the, I’m going to say both of them have been major journeys.         

00:14:46

             

One took about three years just to get that design solidified. That was in early 2022. Now we’re at the end of 24 and we’re just getting, I mean, we. Yesterday received a final article for approval in that we’re going to put in the tank later this afternoon and do quality control testing. And if it does what it’s supposed to, we’ll be ready to go ahead and give the green light for full production.         

00:15:09

             

And so we’re that close. But it’s taken. I mean, we’re coming up on six years of, from the very first of when we started developing this. And so that’s kind of the basic story of what we’ve done. What keeps it moving?         

00:15:25

             

Is it all electrical? Does it still have to run off a generator? We don’t use generators. So the pump that operates it, that’s what keeps the water moving, is we have a pump that’s attached to our design and that’s kind of all comes together. And so the pump gets plugged in to a 120, just a regular standard electrical outlet.         

00:15:49

             

We have a switching power supply that we provide with it that converts the power just from a standard electrical outlet to the 12 volt that the pump can use. Okay, 12 volt. It can also in theory be used on solar power. And we’ve used it on solar power all through the summer months. Like we said, it helps keep algae out of these Tanks keeps mosquito issues down and that.         

00:16:14

             

So we have a lot of people in southern and eastern areas looking at it for the summer use alone and it works very, very well. Now we’re telling people if you purchase a solar option to be used in the middle of winter, we need you to really talk to some local solar power suppliers in your area because we know that you don’t have a lot of sun exposure during the winter months and it needs to be running continuously like it can’t stop for the night and then pick up when the sun comes out because the nighttime temperatures are going to dip and everything’s going to freeze. And so. And you know, lithium batteries and everything, you’re going to have to protect those if you’re going to use it in the winter. And so we’re really trying to encourage people.         

 

00:16:58

             

Yes, we’re doing a lot of severe winter testing as well for solar this year. So if you’re purchasing it for solar, go into it knowing that you really need to look at your solar requirements. It does run on 12 volt. You can technically hook it up to that. Just be really aware of what you’re doing with it in the cold of winter because you don’t have a lot of sun to charge and winter time temperatures drain those batteries fast.         

00:17:25

             

And so that’s the way it’s powered is either via 120 outlets, you know, or via solar power. We encourage people, if you have power available near your stock tanks, use the 120 outlets, the electrical outlets. So, yeah, I think that makes more sense to me. I’ve done that too. When I go out in the morning because we have horses and.         

00:17:52

             

Yeah, you’re breaking the ice all the time. Yes, ma’am. And sometimes you can’t get down there because it’s so thick. And that’s kind of the difference because you say it’s so thick and that’s what we’ve always experienced. And you know, when we’re talking our stock tanks, we’re talking thousand gallon stock tanks for cows.         

00:18:12

             

So you have a huge surface of water that you’re trying to open it and you have a lot of mama cows that are either eating dry feed matter or in the, you know, spring of the year, they’re lactating, so they’re very thirsty. They’re pushing and shoving. Right. And you need to have big areas open so a lot of them can get to the water, the water rippler, because it constantly, like I said, even if it does get ice on it, it’s always moving that water. So it doesn’t build.         

00:18:39

             

And that’s the difference you’ll see, like for your horse tanks and so forth. You know, that it just doesn’t build up. Plus, your horse tanks are typically a lot smaller surface area and be will move the surface of that water. You know, we. We really have.         

00:18:57

             

That was one of our biggest innovative type things that we had to work on is where it sat exactly at the right water level so you got the maximum velocity. So you didn’t have spray. Because we all know if you have spray, it freezes. And if it’s too far underwater, you don’t get enough surface movement and it freezes. And so we really had to find that sweet spot and where to put our pump and everything.         

00:19:24

             

So it didn’t just clog with debris. There was a lot of things that went into that so that we could. Get the most movement on the surface of the water. I think this is so amazing. Thank you.         

00:19:34

             

And just that you. You know what they say, that necessity is the mother of invention, Right? You probably hear that all the time. Because we’ve said it a thousand times with this, right? Yeah.         

00:19:45

             

Right. It’s so true. You had to figure something out because. We’Ve had a lot of people say, you know, how on earth or why did you do this? And we’re like, you know, we have a young gentleman in the community, a teenager, and he’s like, I want to invent something, you know, and that’s so cool.         

00:20:03

             

You know, what should I try to do? I don’t know. And maybe some people are a lot better than we are. We weren’t sitting around thinking, okay, I wonder what we could invent to try to then make this whole business. Because I’m telling you, it is a lot of work what we’ve done.         

00:20:18

             

We weren’t sitting around trying to do that. We were trying to solve a problem that we had. And that’s the only thing we were thinking of at the time, is we need something that works better. But then when we got that, it wasn’t just. It shouldn’t benefit just us.         

00:20:34

             

You know, we know lots of people out there that could very much benefit physically from this. They wouldn’t have to be out there. You know, you wouldn’t believe. Across the nation, we currently have people from 49 of the 50 states and areas in Canada, Mexico, and Australia that have all reached out to us about this product and the amount of, like, personal notes and comments. We’ve got a couple in the panhandle of Texas that are an older couple, and they’re like to not have to go out and chop ice in the winter in our advanced years and the things that they, they shared with us is so special.         

00:21:12

             

And that’s, I’m like this, this right here is why we did took it from the next step out of our tanks to get it to other people’s tanks. Well, the other thing I was just thinking about is because at first I thought now you’re an entrepreneur, but then I also think that as a rancher, you’re already an entrepreneur, certainly. Yeah, right, right. You’re already working for yourself. You’re already making those life decisions on how you sell your beef or how you raise your cows or whatever.         

00:21:46

             

And so this is an added benefit that you’re going to give yourself, but also people that you’re coming up with something that does benefit others. Right. And you know, I believe that in one of your podcasts you had spoke to the ladies from Generator Wyoming, and I think that’s perhaps even where you’d got my name from. And I went through the G Beta program this summer. There was five of us, selected businesses and so forth.         

00:22:14

             

And that’s one of the things that they, you know, tried to like, kind of encourage. They said you need a deep team. You know, in order for to have a successful business. And we sat in front of a lot of mentors and investors and they were, you know, giving us feedback and stuff. And they were saying, you know, honestly, when we see a husband, wife, team coming in that we’re going to build this business, they said a lot of times we’re like, this might not be the best option ever.         

00:22:39

             

And I mean, they were candid because they were trying to help us know what to do. And they said, what is really unique about you guys is I have a degree in finance and Randall’s got all of the electrical, like the master electrician and substation engineering and all of that behind him. So we had those backgrounds and then we’re dropped in one of the most severe weather areas in the state of Wyoming because Oshoto is just not nice for the most part during the winter months. It’s a very harsh climate. And so we were dropped here and then given this like design and solution to figure out.         

00:23:18

             

They’re like, you are absolutely the right people because you are not sitting in a lab somewhere trying to come up with a solution. You’re out there, you’re actually doing it. You know, the struggles, you know that you’ve got to have a factor to keep the debris from plugging it because there’s going to be new debris daily in your tank. Animals are going to slobber in your tank, you know, the struggles you’re going to have. And so they’re like, we actually see this as being a huge benefit for you guys building this because you do.         

00:23:48

             

You bring the corporate knowledge from two huge industry fields with you and then apply it to the generational ranching and say, there are solutions out there now. How do we get it to move forward? So I think it’s so interesting, Shondah, that you came from a finance background and then and worked, you know, in the corporate world and then returned to the ranch. What was the big life change that made you want to return to the ranch? My father passed away in 2010, and our ranch had passed down from.         

00:24:26

             

I said my great grandfather and grandmother put it together, and then it had skipped a generation to my parents. And in all reality, if my father lived probably another 10 or 15 years, the possibility is that it would have skipped another generation, our generation, and gone to one of the grandkids, if any of them were interested, which our son thought, you know, that the potential was to come back and do that in the distant future. Right. Well, when my father passed away, our son was a junior in high school, and so. And he was the oldest of the grand children that, you know, had any potential.         

00:25:02

             

And so my mom wasn’t going to try to run it alone. And, you know, we talked to her and so forth, and we’re like, we will fill the generational gap. We’ll come back. We both had jobs that we really enjoyed. We were living down in the mountains of Colorado, but we felt a call to come back home, and so we did that.         

00:25:23

             

It’s been 15 years, you know, and we’re very happy because I think that it is super hard anymore for the next generation to take over the ranch. Super hard. And we had some financial abilities that a lot of the next generations don’t. Have because we had worked corporate jobs. We had some investment money that we could bring back and help put into it to get it going.         

00:25:50

             

I mean, you know, if you’ve spoken to any generational ranchers, to be able to get into the business, even to buy your equipment and your cattle, and that it is really hard now. That’s why I told you earlier, I truly feel like a lot of our small family ranches, because we’re a very small family ranch. You know, literally, it’s my husband and I that operate this. We only have a couple thousand acres. It’s not like we’re on an enormous place and we have a very deep area of help that we can draw from and so forth.         

00:26:26

             

And so, you know, that was unique to us. My husband’s originally from Louisiana, but when we first married he worked on ranches up here in Wyoming and we worked down in Colorado on some ranches. We love the western lifestyle and for the majority of my kids upbringing we lived very close. And so anytime of school breaks we had or vacations or whatever, my family was out at the ranch with my mom and dad. I’d bring my kids out during spring break and I spent a lot of time, me personally, being the lady of the family.         

00:27:00

             

But I brought the kids out with me. My heart was here on the ranch. I love the animals and I love doing it with my parents and I wanted my kids exposed to that. So like I said, when my dad passed away, it was just kind of a natural progression. Someone needed to fill the gap and we were the ones that had the ability and desire to do that.         

00:27:21

             

Yes, it was a massive adjustment for us and for our kids. You know, our son did benefit. Our daughter graduated the year that we came back, so she never actually came back and lived at the family ranch with us. Our son finished his last two years of high school from here. And I think that he looks on that really fondly because yeah, he loved every aspect of the ranch as well.         

00:27:43

             

We encouraged him when he graduated, go out and get a degree. If you ever come back to here, it’s going to be a choice you’re going to make. It’s not going to be something that you feel like you had to do. You were obligated to do. And now our son’s a data analytics consultant in a very high tech field, you know, and that’s, we’re very proud of him.         

00:28:04

             

He uses his mind and the God, the gifts God gave him very well. And so that’s, that’s what we want for the kids. And I think, you know, a lot of the family ranches, that needs be the decision. You have to have the heart to be here because you can’t just do it out of obligation or it’s not. Going to be a successful transition from one generation to the next.         

00:28:25

             

Yeah. And that’s why you see so many ranches get sold when, when the parents become too old to run them and the kids haven’t embraced that life and they have gone off to college and made that decision not to return. So yeah, it’s a tough one. It is a tough one. And unfortunately a lot of the ranches you Know, I talked about the aging demographics of the American rancher, but there’s not really a good way that rancher needs to stay in.         

00:28:58

             

That’s his livelihood, right? That’s his business, and that’s where he earns his money. But a lot of the small family ranches aren’t big enough to then split that income and support two families. And so what you’re asking your families to do is because, you know, a dad’s not probably going to retire until he’s like, at least in his 60s or early 70s in the ranching world. I mean, in all honesty, right?         

00:29:21

             

So then your kids got to be 50 before they really can transition into that. They’re going to have had to have. Had a career that whole time. Some family ranches work very well and they can transition them, and there’s a great way and enough opportunity for both families to make a living on it and so forth. But I keep going back to the.         

00:29:42

             

Very small family ranches like our family ranch, and it can’t support two whole families. And so you’ve got income. A lot of family ranches, let’s be honest, the family ranch doesn’t support one family. And so that’s why you have so many of one or the other of the spouses working off the ranch. And so then you’re basically working two jobs, right?         

00:30:03

             

You’re working off the ranch and you come home and you help do everything that can’t be done by one person on the ranch. And so it’s a tough way to get to the next generations. And yeah, ours is fourth generation. I don’t know how many generations a lot of ranches can keep going deeper, deeper, deeper into. Because it’s.         

00:30:24

             

It’s a hard business, too. It’s not like a dry cleaner. And those are hard businesses, too. But a lot of times you can transition those a little bit, right? Well, family businesses in general, I mean.         

00:30:40

             

You know, absolutely, absolutely. That’s. That’s challenging any way you look at it. But I do think that it. What a great opportunity for you and your husband to have this new product, and that will be an income generator for you.         

00:30:58

             

And so it’ll give you some, you know, relief in that sense. You know, we have told this story now oftentimes because people like to hear the story of what’s happened with us and what we’re doing and that. And we make no bones about it. We truly believe that God positions everybody where he needs them, when he needs. Them, in what point of life.         

00:31:20

             

And we can look back through the journey that we’re currently on with the Water Rippler and see contacts that we made 30 plus years ago in college that are now a part of what we’re doing with the Water Rippler in a very roundabout way. And we’re like, that’s absolutely amazing. Who would have known when we were teenagers at college that people we got to know then would be integral to meeting manufacturers in different states and so forth. 30 some years later when we’re developing a product, I mean, if you just kind of look back over your life and you see and even the careers that we were in that led us to have the knowledge and abilities to do what we do. And if we hadn’t came back to the ranch, we wouldn’t have had the need.         

00:32:13

             

Right Necessities, the mother of invention. And so every one of the steps that we’ve taken along the way, we can look back and say, this was exactly what we were being groomed our whole life to do. Now how do we get it out there? Which is. Yeah, that too is a huge learning curve and experience for us.         

00:32:33

             

But we feel real blessed to be on the journey and it’s been very exciting. We just, we hope that we do it in a good, timely manner because we, we want to get it now that people know about it. They need it now before winter starts and we can only control so much of our production. Oh, really? So I was just going to ask you that next, before we end here, is it available for purchase right now, this moment, today?         

00:32:59

             

No. Hopefully within, honestly, the next few days or week it should be. We are so close and we’ve been telling people that for a while. We just received the final, what we’re hoping will be the final article for approval. Randall’s waiting for me to finish the podcast now to go out and actually quality control test it.         

00:33:17

             

So that’s how close we are. And if it works, we’re ready to go ahead and order the units for our, for our soft launch. And what we’re doing with the soft launch is we’re going to have 300 units. We have all the other parts literally sitting in our shop ready for assembly. So our pumps are there and our switching power supplies there, our couplings and connectors are all there.         

00:33:40

             

We’re waiting for just this last piece that we’re having manufactured. And it’s a reaction injection molding that we have done and it’s in Kansas City. And that’s why I say to people. You know, like, we don’t have injection molding machines. Those are huge, expensive That’s a whole different thing.         

00:33:58

             

Right? And that’s where we’ll eventually go. We can’t do reaction injection molding. We are not manufacturers, as in being able to physically make the bodies of our design. But what we can then do is once we get those manufactured, we have sourced all of our other products.         

00:34:14

             

We have those partners already in place. We’ve received shipments for them. We know our timelines and our leads. So we decided to do. We were originally going to do a soft launch of 100 units, but with a little bit of exposure through the G Beta program, through the Gillette News Record in Cowboy State Daily, our wait list went from a few hundred people to about 1200 people in a matter of like about 10 days literally.         

00:34:43

             

And so that was like overwhelming. And we’re like, okay, maybe not 100 in our soft launch. Let’s do 300 in our soft launch so we can get several out there to people and see, make sure that our assembly and distribution processes are all figured out and down. But we do have all of our supplier contacts kind of knowing that we’re anticipating a lot of units to roll out of here before year end. And so they’re just sitting there waiting for us to like put the blanket pos in for any orders that come.         

00:35:16

             

So once we open the website to take orders, we’ll have those first three, 300. We’ll get those out. But as we know what the other orders are coming, we’ve got them on standby to just keep making and getting them in here. And we’ll assemble and distribute just as quickly as we can. Thankfully, the assembly of them is very minor, if you will.         

00:35:37

             

It takes not that long to put all the pieces together. But, you know, there’s, I believe there’s like six or seven different parts that have to be assembled for each water rippler to leave the ranch to go to someone else’s ranch. And so there is a process currently we do have, you know, some assistance to get those assembled. And then we’re looking at how to get from this stage to bend large scale manufacturing because we do anticipate that we will have distribution channels that will be looking for them and dealerships that will be looking for them. Just we’ve already had, you know, some people reach out for that.         

00:36:15

             

So we want to be prepared. But before we actually get into those channels and we start working with the dealerships and the distribution channels, we want to make sure that we’ve got the process very smooth. Holy moly. Yeah. Holy moly.         

00:36:32

             

You make people. You’re going to really instantly inspire people. Also really make people appreciate what it takes to put something together. You know, go going from the idea to actually manufacturing it to the distribution point. And then as you grow, you’re going to have to figure out every, you know, as you scale and grow, you’re going to have to figure out the next step.         

00:36:58

             

The next step. The next step. Yes, ma’am. Coaches really appreciative of people who came up with so many great ideas. Things we use every day.         

00:37:08

             

Right. It totally makes you think differently. Like when we walk through a store anymore. It’s funny how you look at things different because I’m like somebody came up with that or wow, I really like this packaging. I have to admit to you, I had never really thought about packaging on a retail shelf until we need packaging for a retail shelf.         

00:37:29

             

And so there are a lot of things you don’t even think about that goes into every product that you put in your shopping cart and you bring into your home ranch business all of the steps that go into that. So several weeks ago we started on our Facebook page which is Facebook waterrippler idea to reality series and we just give a very quick glimpse and we just had week four go out last week which was getting us to engineering. I have several more stages and our daughter in law actually assists us with the social media marketing. She does a great job with that of helping us like share not into the details like where nobody wants to read a three page post on it. Right.         

00:38:18

             

But just a really short clip on all the different stages idea to reality. Because even sourcing, like I didn’t know what the word sourcing, I mean from a business background. Yes, I knew what sourcing was. I didn’t know what sourcing really was until I started sourcing. You had to do it.         

00:38:36

             

Yeah, you know everything and business branding, you know, how do you. When we went to get our logo design and so forth, you know, we had like a 10 page questionnaire of what voice do you want your brand to have and what colors do you want to use. And I sat down with my husband who is your epitome of an old time rancher and he’s like a voice of our product. But yeah, he did great helping me and you know, it’s all been a really encouraging and wonderful process but you don’t understand. And so that’s why our idea to reality Facebook posts have been kind of fun, I think for people while they’re waiting for the product to come out.         

00:39:21

             

We’re like, you know, we understand and instead of us just telling you we’re working on it, we’re working on it, we’re working on it. We’re going to give you a little bit of an idea of all the stages we’ve been working on. Because if you’re excited about it, you’ve heard about it since maybe mid August, most of the people think about how we feel. We’ve been working on it since January of 2019. We’re very ready for this product to launch.         

00:39:44

             

Oh my gosh, I’m so excited for you, Shondah. That is so amazing. Well, I wish you the best. So before we go, tell me all the places that people can find you and learn about you, but learn about the Water Rippler. Sure.         

00:39:59

             

On Facebook, as I said, you can just search for Water Rippler and we’ve got a Facebook site there. And then really the only other place is www.water-rippler.com. we’ve got, that’s our e commerce site. Currently on that e commerce site, we do not have it open for taking orders because we truly that’s something else. A lot of business mentors and stuff said, no, go ahead and take pre orders, take pre orders, take.         

00:40:28

             

And Randall and I very much feel until we know that we have a ship date to them that we’re within just X amount of days to get it to them. We didn’t want to take anybody’s money. And so when we know that we put the order in for the Water Rippler units and we get back from our manufacturer, we’ll have these ran this week and they’ll be to you. We’ll then reach out to everybody on our wait list and say, hey, we’re switching the website to go ahead and take orders this date and time. We’ll let that run for a couple of days before we make the public announcement on Facebook and then from there we’ll just let it grow.         

00:41:06

             

Right now that’s the only place is E commerce on our site that you can get them until we kind of, like I said, get the assembly distribution process figured out and get into a little bit faster, more large scale manufacturing. We are meeting with injection molding companies at this time. We have our final injection molding design ready and so that’ll help move us. Into a faster process because you can mold several hundred a day instead of 100 a day like you can.         

00:41:40

             

Yeah, it’s a big difference. So that’s kind of the whole areas that you can get information. And we’re really thankful. I’m thankful that you reached out to us to do the podcast. We’ve had several different places want to do interviews and even that we’ve kind of hesitated with because we don’t want people to get like burned out and think, yeah, they’re not ever going to get this launched.         

00:42:05

             

Like I said, I hope people remember, maybe they’ve known about it 60 days. We’re working on six years here and we know how frustrating it is, but we want it to be right. That’s our biggest thing is if we actually accept somebody’s payment for something that we designed, we want it to do what we tell them it’s going to do. Oh my gosh, I’m so excited. I’m so excited for me because I have horses.         

00:42:31

             

I’m so glad I know you. We have discovered through all of the different things that we’ve done, it’s been really fun. I did that big business course all summer, sat in front of probably 70 or 80 different people in Zoom meetings and so forth. And I don’t think that there was a single day that we’d have a group in the room that didn’t either need it for their own horses or goats or have a family member on a ranch or. It is amazing how many people are still in some way connected to people in agriculture.         

00:43:06

             

And that’s encouraging. I mean, we interviewed with a lady in Oklahoma City and she like knew other people that she could tell on it. I’m. She’s in the heart of a city and she knows people that are like going to benefit from this. And so that’s been really cool for us too, just to see the reach that this could potentially have and the people it could really help.         

00:43:29

             

Oh, absolutely. And, and I do think what something you said earlier is, is very true and that is that people are returning more to homegrown, local, you know, the farm to table movement, you know, food sovereignty. People really are starting and getting away from the big box ideas and wanting. I think it’s so good for our whole society. You know, our daughter is a 4H educator in Virginia and I love.         

00:44:08

             

She does ag in the classroom with primarily second graders out there, first and second grade. And I’m so thankful that’s her heart that takes her 4H education into the classroom. She’s reached out to the teachers. She has more teachers than she could ever have time to actually go into the classrooms. But she wants to share with kids at that age so they start realizing and understanding what agriculture is and where these products, everything from honeybees to dairy, I mean she covers like over the school year, everything.         

00:44:43

             

And a lot of them don’t even associate it as being agriculture, but absolutely everything is. We need people to know and understand and realize that for the food security that this nation needs. Oh, my gosh. And I always tell people, because I grew up in a big Hispanic family, my dad was head of the migrant program for over 30 years in Fort Collins, Colorado. And I always say, when you go to a grocery store, thank a migrant worker because someone picked that apple.         

00:45:12

             

Yeah, someone picked that tomato. Yes, ma’am. I mean, it. It doesn’t magically end up in the grocery store. No.         

00:45:21

             

My mother in law, when she first started coming to the ranch, that was just really eye opening for her. She knew that I was from a ranching background, but until she came in and immersed herself with us for a few weeks at a time, she said, I will never look at a package of ground beef in the store again. The same way. She said, you know it. She said, like to see it, the struggles we have when we’re calving in the middle of March in a blizzard and you’re doing everything in your power to get a frozen baby in and warmed up.         

00:45:54

             

And you know, we care deeply for every animal you raise. Yes. We know what their end purpose is. But as a rancher, you have to have a heart for the animals or you are not going to last very long. And that’s what she said.         

00:46:11

             

I walked through and I have no real concept of what that food is like. And she said, now I walk in and I look at ground beef and go, that’s Shondah out there working, getting that out at this point. And I’m like, yeah, it’s a rancher somewhere that did it, you know, and you’re right. Your apples, your tomatoes, everything we consume right on the ground somewhere. And it takes people that still love it to do it and get it there.         

00:46:39

             

Right, Exactly. Yeah. So it’s great talking to you, Shondah. Have a beautiful day and good luck with your test that you’re going to do right now. Thank you, ma’am.         

00:46:50

             

Yeah, I think that this one’s almost. I mean, we’ve made enough changes that I think this is just like a. Yep, that’s it. Come in and give it a call. Oh, my God.         

00:47:00

             

Oh, my God. Well, you’ll hear from me when I launch your podcast, which will be in a couple weeks. All right, wonderful. Thank you. All right, I look forward to seeing it.         

00:47:09

             

Thank you very much for taking the time to do this with me. Absolutely. Thank you. Take care. Have a great day.         

00:47:16

             

Bye.         

00:47:22

             

Thank you for listening. I’m executive producer Emy DiGrappa. Winds of Change is brought to you by Wyoming Humanities Council, our co-hosts, and all the people who generously share their stories and their time. For more information, go to thinky.org subscribe and never miss a show.