From City Streets to Iowa Farmers: The Hilbert Brothers' 1st Generation Farming Journey
Barn Talk
Tork and Sawyer Whisler
4.6 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 15 October 2025
⏱️ 138 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Welcome to Barn Talk! Today’s episode is all about fresh starts and relentless hustle, featuring Grant and Spencer Hilbert—the Hilbert brothers. These first-generation Iowa farmers have built their operations from the ground up, documenting every step on YouTube and even branching into farming simulation gaming and ag software development.
Sawyer and Tork sit down with Grant and Spencer to talk about their journey: growing up in the suburbs, turning YouTube revenue into land purchases, learning through trial and error, and how they’re now selling beef direct-to-consumer through Farmer Grade. The brothers share hard-won lessons on business, investments, and staying disciplined—plus insights into diversification and innovation in today’s tough agricultural landscape.
If you’re curious how two young guys are rewriting the farming playbook, proving that it’s possible to break in with the right mindset, grit, and some outside-the-box thinking, this episode delivers the goods. Pull up a chair—the barn is open and all the secrets are coming out.
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00:00 "Barn Talk Updates and Growth"
12:49 From YouTube to Farming Success
24:07 Importance of Farm Drainage
40:26 "Training Cows with Virtual Fences"
51:29 Pie, Naps, and Farmer Retirement
56:11 "Delayed Launch, Growing Team Bonds"
01:04:30 "Start Farming Small, Gain Experience"
01:17:31 "Money Printing in Crisis Insight"
01:28:10 EU Debt, Bitcoin, Fiscal Responsibility
01:34:31 "Learning Through Curated Twitter Feeds"
01:47:04 "Opportunities Amid Tough Times"
02:02:06 Building Opportunities From Nothing
02:11:06 Future of AI Content Creation
02:16:09 "Stand Out with Authenticity"
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | All of the food we eat and much of the clothing we wear comes from plants and animals that are raised on |
| 0:04.9 | farms. Farms are different in type, in size, and even in names. |
| 0:25.9 | Welcome to Barn Talk. What happens at the barn stays in the barn, but not today. We're going to let it all out for you guys. Today is going to be a real, real special episode. |
| 0:31.5 | We got two great guests coming to the barn this morning to have a great conversation with us. |
| 0:36.8 | This has been a guest that a lot of people have reached out and asked, when are you going to get them on the show? When are you going to get them on the show? When are you going to get them on the show? And we've actually have had one of these people, one of these guys on our show in the past, but it was such an early on episode that I don't know if everybody's seen it. So he's coming back on today to |
| 0:55.7 | give us an update on everything he's got going on. But before we get into it, you guys know the |
| 1:02.4 | drill. If you get any value from the show, please share it out with the people that you know. |
| 1:06.9 | The more that you guys do that, the more that the show grows uh the more guests we can have on |
| 1:11.6 | the more episodes we can make it's kind of the ticket to admission to watch or listen to the show |
| 1:16.5 | and i guarantee you you're going to get a lot of value from this one because there's a lot of good |
| 1:20.7 | stuff uh another thing you can do to help us out here at barn talk is leave a review on spotify |
| 1:26.1 | or apple the more that you guys do |
| 1:27.9 | that, the more credibility it gives our show so we can have more guests come to the barn and have |
| 1:32.2 | great conversations with us. Last thing you can do to help us out here at Barn Talk is support |
| 1:37.4 | our direct-to-consumer meat business, farmergrade, farmergrade.com. Right now we are running an exclusive farm fresh beef drop with Hilbert Farms, Grant and Spencer Hilbert, |
| 1:51.1 | here in Iowa that have pretty damn good size YouTube followings that have documented the process of raising cattle from calf all the way to finish. |
| 2:02.5 | And they're running their beef through Farmer. And you can get it right now. It's limited. They raised eight head |
| 2:07.5 | of cattle. And so once it's sold out, it's sold out. It's gone. And can't get any more farm |
| 2:13.3 | to table than that. So you can always use code barn talk to save 10% off your order. And we just |
| 2:21.0 | appreciate if you want some of that beef. Go get it. How are you doing today? I'm doing good. I'm |
| 2:24.7 | excited. I'm excited too. I guess I'll kind of get into who's coming on the show today. But |
| 2:32.0 | two brothers that you guys probably know uh they have |
... |
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