A southeast Kansas woman is becoming a household name on social media. Katherine Umbarger has turned her love of homesteading into a lucrative business, selling an estimated 16,000 copies of her self-published cookbook in a month’s time.
It all began when she uploaded a video of her family’s journey building their home in rural Woodson County. The post went viral. In the time since, Umbarger has amassed 600,000 followers on Facebook and nearly 300,000 on TikTok.
Originally from Weaubleau, Mo., 31-year-old Umbarger moved to Chanute after meeting her husband, Kyler. The couple have six children.
In 2019, the couple sold their house in Chanute and began a life of travel while her husband worked on an oil pipeline. “That’s kind of where all this social media stuff started,” she said. “I had a huge crafting business before we moved, but I couldn’t do it on the road. So, I was using social media as a way to earn passive income.”
Umbarger and her husband work as a team, she noted. “When my husband worked on the pipeline, I was able to buy everything he needed for his truck with my crafting business,” she said. “I built up his whole rig for him while he was gone working.”
By the fall of 2020, Kyler decided to start his own construction company — Umbarger Construction. They moved back to Kansas and settled onto what is now their farm. “We are smack dab between Iola, Yates Center, and Chanute,” she added.
After a brief hiatus to Oklahoma for a job building a bison working facility for the Osage Nation Ranch, the pair returned to their farm with the goal of building a new home for themselves.
“We tore down the house that was there and did the dirt work.”
A year later — and the birth of a baby — Kyler returned to Oklahoma for more work on on the Osage Nation Ranch. Meanwhile, Katherine stayed in Kansas, living in temporary quarters — a camper — with six children.
“I also managed all our animals. It was pure chaos,” she said. “When he got back, we really got busy working on the house.”
It was during this time that things really took off professionally for Umbarger. “I had been posting videos of us building the house ourselves,” she said. The DIY project proved popular, and Umbarger’s audience grew substantially.
Once the family moved into their new home in July, Katherine transitioned to sharing her recipes online.
When it comes to work, Umbarger said she is a jack-of-all-trades.
“I’m a stay-at-home mom, run our farm, and work with my husband whenever he needs extra hands,” she said. “Social media is my biggest job and I also work in a referral program for a company called Melaleuca, helping people buy from non-toxic, U.S.-made companies.”
Her work with Melaleuca — a wellness shopping club — has translated over into her social media content. Her videos showcase how to make things with simple ingredients to promote a healthy lifestyle. The driving force behind this content is homesteading — a lifestyle of self-sufficiency. Modern day homesteaders rely very little on others by growing and preserving their own food and repurposing items. The transition into this type of lifestyle was easy for Umbarger since she grew up on a farm.
