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 Manager, 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.
Mike and Shaunda Richardson married in October 2019 and bought this place in May 2020. Everything standing here today has been built out since — with a great deal of patience and a fair amount of learning what works and what doesn't.
Shaunda has built more than one career from the ground up — first as a midwife, and later as a massage therapist in the Tulsa area, where she ran a thriving practice for many years. She holds a bachelor's degree in nutritional science from Oklahoma State University — and that training is a large part of why this farm exists at all. She spent years studying what food is actually made of, and would rather produce it here than buy it: nothing sprayed with pesticide, no antibiotics or additives in the meat, and birds that spend their lives out on grass.
Away from the farm she's deeply involved in the dog rescue community, serving on the board of the Oklahoma Pet Collective and volunteering with the Oklahoma Alliance for Animals. She does not sit still.
Mike served in the Navy from 1990 to 1993 and in the Army from 2003 to 2006, with service in Desert Storm, Operation Restore Hope, and Korea.
He came into document management in 1994, while the industry was still in its infancy, and has worked in that field exclusively ever since — rising to Vice President of the second-largest reseller of one of the best-known document and content management platforms in the world. He grew up rural and spent decades wanting a working farm of his own. Black Dog Ranch is where those two halves finally met — and BDR Farm Manager, the software that now runs this place, is what came of it: thirty years of knowing how records and workflow ought to work, pointed at a barn instead of an office.
Why "Black Dog Ranch"? The name comes from the dogs. Shaunda has always been partial to black and tans, and the majority of the dogs the two of them have rescued over the years have been exactly that.
Neither of them learned this place out of a manual. They still turn up at events around the region regularly, picking up techniques both new and old from people who have been at it longer.
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.