Friday, April 25, 2025
For the Archie family, social media has become a space where they can inspire others with content about agriculture, family, and faith.
With 1.3 million followers on TikTok, Cody and Erika Archie, along with their children, Kylee and Clancy, offer a glimpse of their daily lives at Bar 7 Ranch, a Gatesville farm and businesses that raise beef cattle and dorper sheep. As first-generation ranchers, they aim to educate their followers on agriculture as well as share everything they’ve learned about running a ranch.
“If you have never been involved in agriculture a day in your life, we kind of try to explain it and make things easy for everybody to see and understand,” Cody said.
Bar 7 Ranch has evolved throughout the years since Cody and Erika first started running cattle on it in 2015. Last year, the Archies built a feedlot so they could sell local beef to consumers in Central Texas, a process they had an opportunity to share with their followers.
“That was a dream of ours from along this whole journey of being first generation (ranchers) — was having a small feedlot and growing it,” Erika said. “We’ve shown the whole process of starting small and just growing from early on.”
Along with agriculture, the Archies enjoy sharing the behind-the-scenes lifestyle of a ranching family and offering a bit of comedic relief.
“We have such a diverse audience,” Erika said. “People on our channel are there to watch ranching and to watch the automotive side of us building the square bodies. People are there just for fun and to laugh at our funny marriage humor.”
The family shows how they run other projects, such as owning a local dry cleaning and laundry business and restoring old cars. Cody said one of their most popular videos documents him and his son rebuilding a 1984 Chevrolet pickup.
“We share our experiences, our ups and our downs,” Cody said. “We just want people to see the real lifestyle behind what a lot of families in America are — having two to three different jobs going on and maybe a side hustle or two just to provide for your family and do the best you can with what’s going on around you.”
“We show the life of an entrepreneur, the life of a rancher, the life of a family,” Erika adds. “The genuine life of family behind ranching. We just kind of show it all.”
The Archie family also hopes to encourage others with their faith.
“We do a capsule sermon every Sunday where we share a scripture and I explain it,” Cody said.
With Easter approaching, he said the family will post daily content about the life of Christ leading up to Easter Sunday.
“We want people to see and find the Lord through our content,” Cody said. “And beyond that, we want people to come and have fun.”
Although Cody and Erika have posted regularly on Instagram and Facebook since the mid-2010s, it was not until August 2021 that they gained a massive following on TikTok.
Erika said it all started after a TikTok post of Cody quoting a Denzel Washington movie quote while checking the cows one morning went viral. Since then, the Archie family has gained more than 2.5 million followers across all their social media channels.
“I think most of our content started out with a lot of humor,” Erika said. “I think that’s how we grew our audience — just our family being funny. I mean we live on a ranch and our name is Bar 7 Ranch, and ranchers do other things besides just ranch all day. So we show the life of all the things that we do.”
Born and raised in the Gatesville area, Cody and Erika also enjoy remaining involved in their community. This includes serving as active members of Hay Valley Baptist Church and on the Coryell County Farm Bureau board of directors, where Cody is the current president of the board. Erika is also a club manager for Hay Valley 4-H.
“We just get up every day and go to work like everybody else does. We just really feel like God has blessed us by giving us a platform to talk about agriculture, about our family, but most importantly about Him,” Cody said. “At the end of the day, that’s what we want people to see the most of — is God through our platforms.”
Readers can find Cody, Erika and their family by following @bar7ranch on social media or visiting bar7ranch.com.
