Their son was three weeks old when Lexi Marek Beeler and her husband decided to leave St. Louis. For 15 years, Beeler had lived away from her home in southeast Iowa, where she grew up on her family’s farm as the sixth generation to live there. During a Your Ag Empire podcast episode, she walked through the decision to return home and move to a rental house outside Riverside, twenty minutes from a town with a few churches and a Casey’s.
Her business came with her. Beeler founded LMB Consulting in 2023, and she runs it as a fractional marketing operation for agricultural and rural companies. On the podcast, she put the pitch in one line: “You don’t need someone full-time all the time.” A client that needs a launch handled, a trade show booth filled, or an event run brings her in for that stretch instead.
That fits agriculture for a reason most industries never have to think about. Farm businesses run on a calendar nobody controls. Beeler explained on the same podcast that her busy season is trade show season in winter, but that preparation lands in fall during harvest, and that during planting her producer clients are in the field rather than thinking about marketing.
Her own site describes three lines of work: hands-on marketing execution, strategic consulting for leadership teams, and keynote speaking. In a February 2026 interview, she told Bold Journey, “My work is rooted in supporting rural places and especially rural women, helping them feel seen, confident, and equipped to grow what they’re building.” She added that the point of her work is helping clients tell a story clearly: “What I love most about my work is bridging agriculture and communication. There are so many great stories in this industry, and I’m passionate about helping clients show up consistently and authentically without marketing feeling overwhelming or forced.”
Photo Courtesy LMB Consulting
Beeler grew up on Marek Land and Livestock, a Riverside operation of cows, sows, and row crops that the family website dates to 1896 and calls a “Century Farm rooted in family.” She started showing pigs at age five. During a 2017 episode of its FarmHER series, RFD-TV followed her final Iowa State Fair show at twenty-one years old, capturing her final time walking a calico pig named Philip through the grand drive. Her grandfather, Larry Marek, who has served on the Iowa Soybean Association board and as a United Soybean Board farmer-director, told the association, “The girls started showing pigs around four years old, and their passion for agriculture only grew from there. I’ve truly enjoyed being their ‘agriculture encyclopedia,’ and I know they now share that knowledge with others. Having young people involved in agricultural organizations is important to build a strong future for agriculture.”
The show ring is where she says she learned to handle anything. Success in the ring “doesn’t happen by accident,” she told Bold Journey. “It comes from early mornings, late nights, consistency, and attention to detail. You learn how to manage your time, set goals, handle setbacks, and keep showing up even when no one is watching.” On a FarmHER panel, she drew the same lesson from Philip, arguing that confidence is different from cockiness because everyone is “born with that ability,” and the work turns it into results.
Photo Courtesy Marek Land and Livestock
Her first marketing job was self-assigned. She “begged her parents for a smartphone and quickly used it to promote her family’s farm,” she wrote on LMB Consulting’s website. At that point, her ambitions were broader. Digging through a box her parents had saved, she found a paper star she had written on at four years old, as she remembered in conversation with the Des Moines Storytellers in 2018: she wanted to be “a supermodel who raises pigs with my dad.”
In 2017, she graduated from Iowa State with a degree in public service and administration in agriculture and minors in journalism and entrepreneurial studies. She became the first employee at FarmHer, the women-in-agriculture media brand. Later, she worked at the Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship with Iowa Secretary of Agriculture Mike Naig, before managing digital marketing at Pig Improvement Company, where “the idea of bringing new ideas into a well-established company” excited her, she recalled.
She began working on events for FarmHER through a scholarship application for an Iowa 4-H award that asked for a world-changing idea. As Beeler recalled in a 2018 interview with AgGrad Live, her initial proposal was modest: “30 people total just over lunch,” connecting students with women already working in agriculture. By her account, it grew into roughly 1,500 attendees across eleven events in multiple states, as people in Iowa and across the country found value in either investing in or attending the events, and in a full-time job she had effectively created for herself at FarmHER.
FarmHER founder and president Marji Guyler-Alaniz, in a testimonial posted on Beeler’s site, credits her with “driving various efforts that grew the brand,” recalling that “she managed and grew digital channels that reached thousands of FarmHERs from across the country” and calling her “the catalyst behind the first FarmHER event.”
Once she moved back home, she said on the Your Ag Empire podcast that she “really struggled with finding my people and feeling like I made the right decision.” In the months after the move, she eventually started asking friends whether anyone else felt the same, and that the answer came back fast enough that “I just decided to go for it.” The first “Hey Sister” was held in Washington, Iowa, in the spring of 2025. The second ran in April 2026 at Copper Creek Ridge in Riverside, with sessions on creative work, women’s health and personal finance, a hands-on workshop, and a closing keynote from Nationwide Insurance consultant Erin Cumings.
Three national agribusiness brands – Nationwide, Bayer and Zoetis – paid to be in a room in a town that counted 1,060 residents, according to figures the Iowa Secretary of State’s office published from the 2020 U.S. Census. Hey Sister describes its audience as rural women, “from farmers and entrepreneurs to mothers and community leaders.” The result is “a dedicated space where these women could come together, share their experiences, and find the resources they need to thrive.”
Photo Courtesy Hey Sister Collective
Beeler argues that building this community is economic, not just sentimental. Her children will inherit the option to farm that ground, and whether they take it depends on what else is within driving distance. “In order for my kids to want to continue my family’s farm, there has to be reasons for them to live where they live,” she said, listing grocery stores, gas stations, libraries, and restaurants worthy of out-of-town visitors. She has been making a version of that case in front of larger rooms. In December 2024, she opened the Iowa State University Extension Women in Ag Leadership Conference in Ames, an event Extension built around career advancement for women in the state’s agricultural economy.
Most mornings, her audience is smaller. From the rental house, she said, she can hold her son up to the window that looks across the road at the machine shed, and he bangs on the glass and waves at his great-grandfather.
Marek Beeler recently attended and posted a slew of content surrounding the Farmfluencers At The Fair event at the Iowa State Fair.
