Recently, Grant took his love for farming to the next level by purchasing real farmland and documenting his journey on YouTube. He shares the triumphs and challenges of transitioning from virtual fields to actual crops, offering a unique perspective on the connection between gaming, content creation, and real-world agriculture.In this episode, Grant takes us behind the scenes of developing American Farmer—from inspiration to execution—and discusses the creative decisions that made the game a hit among players who love farming and simulation games. We also dive into his journey of buying farmland, managing agricultural operations, and using his YouTube platform to share his adventures and inspire others.Whether you're a gamer, a farmer, or an entrepreneur looking for inspiration, this conversation with Grant Hilbert offers a blend of innovation, authenticity, and passion for agriculture. Tune in to discover how Grant is bridging the gap between digital and real-life farming while building a community around shared agricultural interests. Want Farm4Profit Merch? Custom order your favorite items today!https://farmfocused.com/farm-4profit/ Don’t forget to like the podcast on all platforms and leave a review where ever you listen! Website: www.Farm4Profit.comShareable episode link: https://intro-to-farm4profit.simplecast.comEmail address: [email protected]/Text: 515.207.9640Subscribe to YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSR8c1BrCjNDDI_Acku5XqwFollow us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@farm4profitConnect with us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Farm4ProfitLLC/
We're not counting totals. It's like if I need to help him for a day, I'm helping him for a day. If he needs to help me, he's helping me. Any stuff like that, he's always helping.
It's truly, I mean, yes, your family, but the mentality of not trying to tear someone down. Like if we can just all succeed together, right, that rising tide raises all boats. Like once you get that mentality, I mean, the options and the sky is the limit.
There is a podcast in Iowa. Funk for profit was named by they. They stirred up a banker near. Then quick came an auctioneer. Making profit was their first goal. Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy. Soon may the farmers come to bring us guests and beer and fun. One day when the recording's done, we'll take our mics and go. Before we knew, conversations grew. Grow and corn even
Hey, listeners. Welcome back to the Farm for Profit podcast. That was creepy. Hey. How you doing? We haven't had a beer opening at the beginning of a Farm for Fun show for a while. No, we haven't. And I felt like I had to just roll with it, even though you were trying to figure out what our plans were for tonight.
So can we figure the plans out later, or do you need to know what our plans are right now?
I literally just told my wife, she's like, what do you want to do? I was like, I don't know, but I can't figure it out until five, until we're done. And she's like, why? Because I'm busy. That's okay, is what she said.
Well, we were just telling our guests that we weren't going to cut this off at any certain point. If the conversation was good, now we have to be done by five? No.
They don't know what time it is. They don't know what time it is.
It's two o'clock. Well, listeners, thank you for being a part of the Farm Profit Podcast here in 2025. Tanner and Corey hanging out here, getting ready to meet up with Dave on the trade show trail. Ooh, that's hard to say. Trade show trail. The triple T. The triple T. No, it's not. Trade show is T-S.
Wow, one drink in. Trade show.
Yeah. TST. TST. There you go. Thank you so much for everything that you've done. Remember, if you've got ideas for guests like the one we've got on today, farmforprofitllc at gmail.com or hit us up on our social media channels. Do we want to forecast what we think is going to happen to TikTok? Because this is for full disclosure getting recorded. Two days, three days before the ban.
Before the ban. Yeah.
Let's do it in the show. Let's do it in the show.
Okay. With our guests. I think that would be a really great idea. Listeners, again, come see us. We will be at, by the time this episode comes out, we will be in Des Moines. We will be at the Custom Harvesters Convention, the Iowa Ag Expo. Then we load up and go down to Louisville. And hang out at National Farm Machinery Show almost all week.
Come back and finish our little tour in Denver at Commodity Classic. So if you want to come see us, say hi. That'd be great. And we'll have a good time. When do we go to Brazil? Oh, or Spain?
Or Spain.
Yeah. Places that we've all been invited to. I know. Go free of charge. I know. And yet we're not going. We haven't said yes yet. And I don't even have pigs until for like three more weeks. So you're saying let's go to Brazil? We could go.
You think we got listeners that would go with us to Brazil? Maybe. That'd be a really quick turnaround. Well, if you're going to fill an entire plane, it doesn't matter, right? I guess. All right. Are you... Your vocal cords warmed up? I can figure something out.
You want to launch into it? While you're getting a song, you can always call or text us. 515-207-9640. Let us know how we're doing. Guest suggestions. Those who don't like Tanner. Are we playing?
Yeah. When should I go? Oh, you're doing good so far. It's power. It's your favorite. Now you can roll. I can't hear the sound.
Today on the Farm for Fun show, we are live back in studio before we hit the, what do you call it, TST, the trade show trail. Yeah. We got a past guest of the show. He's got millions of followers. He blazed his trail playing Farm Simulator, has a game himself called American Farming. Am I correct? Correct. American Farming.
He's a landowner, and we are going to get an update of everything about his life. We run into all these trade shows. It's going to be awesome. Please welcome Mr. Grant Hilbert.
Yeah. Thank you. Clap, Rachel. I think it was, what, two years ago it came on again?
I think it was a couple years. I mean, because it was back at Dave's office. Yep, yep. And it was you and your brother. We did two shows back-to-back. So Spencer, your brother. Yep. And we wanted him to come today. He couldn't be here, so it's not like we're cutting him out.
Yeah, he's out tearing down houses right now with his excavator. So that's what he loves. He's out doing that.
He does love playing in it.
Yeah, yeah.
Is it the same excavator he had when you guys were here two years ago?
Yep, yep. It's a link belt. It's like a 50,000 pound machine. He always has to try and find a neighbor to haul it, but it seems to work.
No, he hasn't quite got that piece of the puzzle yet.
No, he hasn't got that figured out, yeah.
Honestly, that's probably the piece that you don't want to get because if you could just keep getting favors, then you don't have to deal with the DOT, the wide loads, you know.
Exactly. And he's on a streak. He had, I think he's gone to three or four neighbors' houses, and it's like moves a mile down the road, does a project for a neighbor, moves a mile down the road, does a project for a neighbor.
Perfect.
Yeah.
And he's taking out a house every time or just other people?
A house, and then here he's taking out a shed for another neighbor.
What is the process? Is that a county thing, a state thing of like, you can dig a hole and push this house into the hole? Or you can light it on fire?
I don't know if he even knows that, let's say.
Perfect. You just don't ask questions.
You just do it.
That is the guy. The minute you ask questions is when you have problems. That is absolutely right. I know. It seems like whenever I light something on fire that it gets called in.
Now, the best to do there is you call the non-emergency line and tell them you're going to be having a fire at this address and to not be alarmed. But see, with my family...
There's a lot of fire problems.
Well, that and whatever. They might want to establish a don't ask, don't tell policy of what they're burning. Those are the fires that get lit at night is what you're saying. Right. Boy, there's so many different directions that could go.
I know a lot of farmers that do that, maybe. Sometimes you just got to get rid of something. So last time we chatted, fresh into the making real farming content,
Yeah. Yeah. That was, it'd probably be a year into making real farming content. And yeah, I didn't know too much then like about farming stuff kind of getting figured out, but now I'm starting to get kind of learn a little more every year and starting to feel like I, I know a little bit at least.
So how did 2024 go?
24 was good. So I'm farming now kind of in the region both you guys are and where Corey is. And so my year went exactly like the way Corey described it. It was pretty much like flooding, probably 10, 15% acres had to replant. And then, you know, your stand, like Corey described in another podcast, he was so spot on. It was like... A week delayed of stand.
You had corn plants emerging a week, two weeks after. And I'm going out there on YouTube and I'm like, guys, this is 160 bushel corn max. Like we're not going to get it. And then summer keeps going on and on and on. It's like, dang, this is actually getting close to perfect. Like perfect situation you could have asked for after all that rain. And so we ended, I'll call it amazing for the spring.
We had like best possible scenario. I'd say could have caught one more rain in August. It would have been.
Yeah, and where your fields are that I know of. Should we give an exact location? It was a very – man, that area. I had some seed customers in that area that were just, I mean, way better than us even down here. Yeah. And I'm like, holy cow, guys. Like, that is crazy for what we had for the spring. Yeah, yeah. If you do want to hear that, I think that was on Snark's podcast, Farm Yourself.
It's not even GoFarm. It's just Farm Yourself podcast. That was one of his – Not the first, but one of his first guests that he had. So he's interviewing some cool people.
Yeah. So I farmed one of these farms the first time this year, and it has a pothole, like a 10-acre pothole. And I was like, if we get a dry year, this is going to be perfect. Praying for a dry year. We get the opposite of a dry year on that farm and stuff, and it needs a lot of tile.
But you've got a tile plow now, right?
Yeah, yeah. That's one of the things we did is we – That's one of the things when you go into farming and stuff, it's like, what are they putting pipe out there? Why are they so aggressive doing it and stuff like that? And you go do it, and, you know, like in 22, I had a terrible crop because I planted a crop wet. It was wet, you know, didn't wait for it to dry, and then it got dry late too.
And so those spots with tile, it was – you could see it across the yield monitor. So that's when I was like, okay, we need to start pattern tiling every farm, you know, at least a majority of the flats. And so then we bought a tile plow this –
this fall and we're just going aggressive on just every own piece we're going to tile tile out as a goal so where did i mean so farming is one thing but tiling is completely different than farming like how do you how'd you learn how to do that uh so ben iowan farmer so if you guys he's in southern iowa there he bought a soil max tile pile he bought a quad track and then he came and custom tiled one of my farms we did all the labor he ran the tractor and
It's like, dang, once you get the hang of it, this is pretty easy. And then you realize how much the custom cost is. They do some calculations. It's like, dang, this is a $500 an hour job. Heck, I should hire everything else out of the farm and just run the tile plow.
Yeah.
It seems like so.
Wow. You know, we have a tile plow as well, and we still haven't used it for seven, eight, probably nine years now at this point. And it is, it is like, why you look at that thing sitting there and shit, like, why are we not, you know, and it comes down to, uh, labor and timing, but like, like you said. We should just make the time and get the labor to do that.
Exactly. And there's some – like around here in your area, there's some big mains. You've got to put in like 15, 18-inch mains. That's where it's like I'd hire somebody out to do those projects, but all those laterals are –
I think part of our problem is we just never have a plan, right? So, like, I think our next step on the farm is to just bring someone in to help us literally if we were going to pattern tile every field. You know, we want to know our outlets. We want to know, you know, what our grade is. What is the plan, right? And we're going to have to pay for that. And then, yes, hire out the big stuff.
Get it done. Get the professionals to come in and put that in, and then we can go have a plan of attack. And then I guarantee you we would get X amount in per year or whatever we had time for, right? If you have a week, two weeks, three weeks, you just go get it done.
Yeah. And the nice thing about this area is we're around some big towns. It's like you could hire some college kids out of Iowa State or some of these big towns around here to pay them $20 an hour or whatever to come help you with a lot of labor. Yeah.
so we should rewind i'm sure all the regular listeners that have been with us from the beginning know your story but we have picked up a lot and i can't tell you guys the amount of times i get you should have this person on or you should cover that topic and i'm like actually in 2022 we did you know so they just haven't made we've we've put out a lot of shows how many shows have we put out
Well, 104 a year. I think we're up to like 560. Holy crap. So yeah, it's no question why things get buried and someone might not have made it back to your original show. So let's not spend as much time as we did in the first one. But you got a pretty unique story. Because you're not a farm kid. Go back to Little Grant.
Ooh. Okay, yeah. So basically, keep it short and sweet. Basically... Grew up in central Iowa.
You can take as much time as you want. We got until 5 o'clock.
True, true, true. Grew up in Ankeny, Iowa here. And then my grandparents always farmed in northern Iowa. So they were into cattle a lot in the 70s and 80s. And then they were just mainly row crops. But as a kid, we were always just back up on the farm. And so that's where you got kind of addicted to the farming is like sixth, seventh grade. Spring break and summers and stuff, you're back up there.
And then, I don't know, I kind of always had knack, not for, well, basically for entrepreneurship. But as a kid, we were always doing these, I'll call it little tactics to try and like make money and stuff like that. Like we were doing drop shipping when we were like seventh and eighth grade. And trying to figure out that, we failed at a lot of that stuff.
But then eventually we were like, okay, well, let's... Let's start a YouTube channel. And it was honestly my buddy's idea. So we started a YouTube channel. We just played like a bunch of new games, video games that came out. And the idea was that everybody's going to be searching for these new games, going to get a lot more views than playing like GTA or something like that that's already popular.
So then we did that and then, uh, eventually farming took off and I was addicted to farming and stuff like that. First time I actually played the game, I just posted it on YouTube, started taking off. And then a lot of, uh, a lot of like ad kids started watching it and I'll call it by. by the time I was going into college in 2016, I've been doing YouTube for two years.
We're at like 30,000 subscribers. I was like, okay, we got an opportunity here. Um, there's a clear path. Let's just go at it hard for the next four years. And so from 2016 and 2020, I just posted a video every single day. And then like close to when I was graduating college, uh, that the squad, the farm is their channel hit a million subscribers. And, uh, and then it was like, Dane,
maybe I could go out and chase being a farmer. And so I just started buying some farmland in southeast Iowa there. And then at that same time right after college, I also started a software company where we created a mobile game called American Farming. So we got like Case IH, Versatile, New Holland, Licensed, a bunch of different brands in there.
That's awesome. How wild is that?
There's going to be questions that I'm going to ask, but... The overarching theme is you played on a computer.
Yeah, yeah. You can make it sound kind of interesting, yeah. And now you're doing it in real life. Yeah.
So you went from having to blow the dust out of your keyboard to now you've got to blow the dust out of your own cab.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Well, the funny thing now is most people think playing video games is fun, but I look at the video game part, like the YouTube part, as the work. Then when I go and farm, it feels like I'm playing out there, basically. And that's the goal, is you always want to do something you feel like is just play. Right. But yeah.
But you, before we started recording, you said you graduated in 2020.
Yep, yep. COVID year.
So you're what, 26? So he's got an extra level of eligibility. Yep. And you own farmland. Yeah. And you owned it pretty early in your time from doing the squad and all that, right?
Yeah. Like, that senior year of college, I was looking at, like, every morning before class when I woke up, I'd just look at, like, all the realtor listings. And the goal was just to honestly buy a property that I could, like, flip, kind of, just do work and flip and do a good buy. I should have just bought quality, high-quality farm ground at the start there, but... Live and learn, kind of.
But yeah.
But a 20-some-year-old kid, I mean, even if you're making a little bit of money on YouTube, not very many of them can go out and buy land. So you must have monetized and found something that worked.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Like when I was in college, it was like, you know, full-time income plus that and stuff. And so by the time you're exiting college, it's like, well, Dane, you go get a farm credit loan. And that ended up being like a really lucky time period because that was COVID. Yeah. Interest rates were low.
You did strike that one pretty.
It was lucky, yeah. Went and bought, yeah, three farms in the span of like four months right then and then locked everything in for like 30 years.
There's people that are 70 years old that don't go buy three farms in seven months. Right. Unless you're Corey.
I have not done that. I have not done that. But that's just amazing because last week we were at FarmCon together, and there was a big old Twitter storm of haters coming on, and maybe the award could have been called something different, but everyone that went got the top influencer award for FarmCon.
And there was, what, maybe 30, 40 people that were there and got it, which was kind of cool, right? Got us there. Yeah. And the haters on Twitter and other platforms, quite frankly, and we've had it throughout the years that we've been doing this. But really, I think it's a... telltale sign of the times that people are starting to get squeezed a little bit.
Cause they just got frustration and they want to put it out on somewhere, but they're calling you and us. I wouldn't put us as the influencers that like you are, but that we're not real farmers. We're actors that are out there not doing it. And it's like, what are your thoughts on that?
I don't know. I, I saw, I saw some of that. Uh, it's like, I don't know. I go back and forth. It's, Yeah, you're going to get ripped apart. I don't get ripped apart much on social media as much as I do. Maybe behind the scenes I do, but it's kind of good if you're getting ripped apart a little bit on there. It's not the worst, and I think that's just human nature.
I have actually heard someone complain after you bought one of your pieces.
Okay, yeah, yeah.
And they don't know you, didn't even know your name. They just said, heard some YouTuber bought the farm ground that they made from the money that they made on YouTube. And they're just pissed.
They didn't work hard for that.
They didn't work hard for that. And meanwhile, I'm like, I know Grant. Grant's a great dude. And he worked hard, just maybe not in your definition of hard.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. I don't want to say this and sound too cocky, but it's kind of just working smart versus working hard. Exactly. No farmer's going to go out there and plant by hand or plant with a horse, right? So every farmer's run big equipment or just work a little smarter sometimes.
And if they're thinking about hours, you put in just as many hours as everybody else did.
Yeah.
From your production, your editing. You just got paid more per hour.
Which is everybody's goal. Exactly, yeah. And I just had more leverage on it just because it's like, well, I'm not selling one copy to one kid. It's like I'm selling a million copies to a million kids that are watching that video. So with social media and internet, it's just like a leverage thing where I just had a lot of leverage. leverage behind me when I was making videos.
And let's be honest, these opportunities are equal, right? Like anyone could have went and started a YouTube channel and thought of that. They just didn't.
Or if they did, which we've done before, had an idea and don't put it into motion, then somebody else does it. We can't be mad at them for doing it.
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And on the like farm sim stuff, there's like, there's been a lot of, uh, I always call kids, but they're probably 15, 18 years old where it's like, they kind of wanted to get into it. And so I've helped them and stuff. And I've kind of showed them, I was like, I'm not that funny. I'm not that entertained.
I just, I just, once I see a little bit of money, I kind of just go after it pretty hard and stuff. I'm like, well, these, you could do the same thing as me and stuff. And so there's been a lot of like kids I've kind of taught to do the same thing. And they almost had a high school. They do it full time now too. So, Uh, so yeah.
So what is, what is the secret to being a YouTuber that actually could make full time?
Um, on the real life stuff, I haven't figured it out. Like the real life content. So like Zach Johnson's content, he does an awesome job. I try and learn a lot from him and stuff. So on the farm sim content though, um, it's more like, um, I don't know, going viral. It's like not doing what you want. Like I want to just farm in those farm sim videos.
But what we'll do is we'll do like Dukes of Hazzard role play or something like that. And some of those videos will get a million views or we'll do gold mining. Gold mining has been like super popular.
You can gold mine on farm sim?
Yeah. You can do a lot of – With what?
Like a John Deere tractor or –
uh no you there's mods where you can gold mine i mean there's excavators there's there's great setups yeah it's insane it's a it's a whole different gold mine game on there basically now hold on just a minute here are you still making videos playing farm soon yeah yeah no i do that that's that but why why don't you make videos playing your own game Oh, so I do both. I do both. Yep. Yep.
But my own game, so it's a mobile game. So it, it like, it doesn't get as many views. I knew that going into it, that it's not going to get as many views. So we'll rotate like two farm civ videos a week, one mobile game a week. Um, yeah.
I'm curious about how that worked out because I know that when someone like Pat McAfee leaves an organization and then steps off and does his own thing. Well, there are barstools in the news right now of a couple of folks leaving and going to start up their own brand. How's that like? I mean, you didn't leave, right? You still play the game.
Yeah.
But you made a game.
Yeah, so I kind of look at it, and it's one thing you've got to kind of be in that, I'll call it gaming space, to know the difference. So Farming Simulator, they do a great job on their... Well, they do a decent job on their game, but what they did so amazing is they added mods to it. And so it's a very Europeanized game off the base, but all the mods are like American equipment.
And so the amount of stuff you can do in Farming Slayer, because you have a whole creator economy that is making mods... is insane. So basically everybody makes American maps, American equipment. Okay. Now you got American game because of the modders, but on mobile, they drop a game and it's very Europeanized and there's no mods. You can, it's just not possible to make mods on mobile.
So we were like, Hey, we need to make an American game on mobile. So that game is literally made out of Iowa, basically Iowa's terrain. And so any like us kid that comes up to me or like Midwest kids is like, Dane. Yeah. You guys did a nice job on that, but we don't pull as many sales out of Europe or,
south america even compared to farm and slayer so it's it's kind of taking reins in a different aspect that one that we saw opportunity in have you ever played cory i have never played either one i've never played either i've watched people i never have and i've never like so not that i didn't play video games like i played call of duty yeah and uh Way, way beyond your time.
Counter-Strike before that. But I was like at first-person shooter games in college. But I farmed all my life, and I never had the – I mean, I loved farming, but I just never had that drive to go, you know what, after this day of helping Dad on the farm this weekend, I want to go back and farm some more in the video game. But I've always been that way.
I've never been able to keep a garden because – Why would I want to go home and play in the dirt more when I just did that all day? I just farmed 1,000 acres. Why would I want to go home and farm a tenth of an acre?
But you guys have probably had buddies that are from city, not farming. Oh, 100%. It's insane how many kids it draws from outside of farming.
The first time that we did our interview with you and your brother, I had neighbors coming up saying, I can't believe you had those guys.
Oh, really?
They're my favorite. I'm like, you...
watch oh i play i don't just watch you know it's kind of neat to see what they're like i mean in a way farm farm sim has probably done more advocating than any of us in the actual space yeah exactly uh like farm sim and i'll call it the even though the influence the influencers it's like and back way back to that thing you're talking about earlier it's like they've kind of in a way made farming cool again not that you can give yourself that much pride behind you but
There are so many kids that watch YouTubers that aren't even interested in farming, but they're watching farming YouTubers. It's insane.
So we cut Rachel's mic off because she was getting mouthy in the last episodes, but she did insert a question in the chat. She wants to know, how do you have time to do real farming when you're making all the content on FarmSim?
I honestly, like per week, the amount of hours I spend on FarmSim, 10, 10 hours a week or something like that. Like it's not much.
You've got it down to a science. 10 hours actual farming and then you've got editing and stuff.
Yeah, I've got editors that edit it. They'll do the thumbnail. They'll upload it to YouTube. All I do is just drop them the video kind of. So I've just made it pretty simple.
Yeah, same thing we did.
Yeah, it's honestly not much at all. Then the American farming side, like that game, we still have – six, seven people on that team and we're still building a lot more projects and content and stuff. And that I've got a project manager on there that he does everything. And that was by far the best decision is to get a project manager.
I realized really quick, I'm not a good manager when it comes to managing developers and coders.
So you have a full team that's full time on this?
Yep. Yep. Yep.
How big is that?
Uh, six, six and a half, I'll call it cause of part time or something. Sure. But yeah.
Holy cow. Just think, full-time people, six, that are just... You, from just playing a video game... Wow, way to... A farming video game. I'm laying it down, and I'm going to build it up here. This is why we're professionals.
Appreciate it.
So, and then you got all these Twitter trolls, or trolls in general, that was not just at you, but influencers as a whole. You are creating... wealth for yourself and wealth for so many other people, probably more than what the actual farm is doing directly.
Oh yeah.
Like it's crazy.
Definitely, definitely. And I feel like that's what we've seen. And maybe in agriculture it hasn't been taken advantage of as much, but it's like when you build an audience, like a large audience of some sort, then when you build a company or have something around that audience, you can scale that really quick.
You have all those marketing and advertising costs out of there, and you can scale really quick. So you see a lot of big YouTubers like the Mr. Beast, the Pauls. Like I remember Paul Brothers. They were like, yeah, we're going to be the first social media billionaires. I was like – There is no way. And then now you look at it, it's like, yeah, they're going to get there. Same with Mr. Beast.
He's going to be a billionaire. It's like they're scaling these companies so quick. And so I wonder if in agriculture we'll have that where people start building, I'll call it, large company off the backs of their kind of followers. Not in a bad way, in a good way.
Right. We've said it all along. I mean, the reason a lot of companies want to work with Farm for Profit is – In real life, the best sale is word of mouth. It's customer testimonials. Okay, you've got a farmer that doesn't utilize social media, and they go to church, and they go to school events, and they can, what, tell 15, 20 people adequately in a month?
For someone who's really social, how good a product is or what they're doing, you reach out to someone who utilizes social media, That can provide an honest opinion or approach or review of something that's going on, whether it's a new technology or topic or something like Boa Sofra that could be literally financially changing of a position in your operation. That's all we do.
We just tell it publicly. Instead of 20 people, we tell 200,000. We tell 2 million when something gets watched.
Yeah, even that – how do you pronounce it? Boasofra? Yeah. I even saw that, and I texted Corey. I was like, I'm doing that right away. And I wouldn't have known about it at all.
Well, shoot, I've got to put him in the platform.
Yeah.
But it is. That's the way – and I'm not talking just sales. We're not trying to sell a new tractor. I mean, obviously, we love our partners, John Deere and Maya and everybody that I could go down the list. That's not the point. It's the same way with new research or new technologies or traits. I mean, word of mouth is the fastest way to gain trust. And this is just another version of doing that.
Exactly. Exactly. Yeah.
I think so many people look at – say you're farming and you see these big farmers and they got a goal. I got 1,000 acres now and I want to go to 5,000 or 10,000 acres. And they think that they're just going to get there by just working that extra hour, talking to the landlord. And they can. They certainly can. But if you look at any of these big farms –
that are ultra successful didn't just grow for the wrong reason but like there's usually something else that they were doing on the side supporting the farm yeah that they were throwing money back at it you know supporting their habit and uh that's all this is
yeah and that's one of the things i realized about farming it's like and i i make i try and make this very clear because there's some young kids that watch like the youtube channel that i'm only here because of outside capital like i'm not a good farmer is what is what i try and try and tell the kids but the outside capital it's like when there's when there's tough times it's like you can really take advantage of those by having just a little bit outside income that's that's the biggest part and then you compound that over
40 or 50 years of taking advantage during the tough times with some of that outside capital. And it's like, that seems like the perfect game plan. But then it's like, if you don't have that, then it's like, boy, it would be tough for the next 40 or 50 years. And so...
And everybody gets it in a different fashion. It's not like it's not happening. They may work in town or the truck that they have for hauling grain, now they're picking up elevator loads. Everybody does it when times get tough.
I remember one of the first two Farm for Profit conferences we had that there was a pretty big stage talk on keeping your powder dry, getting yourself ready for the opportunities. Because if you can buy equipment on the down cycle when everybody else doesn't have money to do so... Or if you can save up for that opportunity when land corrects itself 10%.
You know, it's not going to correct itself 50%. But if you can even get 10% off before it starts to swing up, you know, there's a lot of things that our listeners can do if you do prepare yourself and have some extra capital available to be able to jump into the ballgame.
Yeah. Yeah.
Newsflash.
Everyone can make money at $7 corn, right? And times are good. But if you can thrive... because of either decisions you made on the farm or off the farm, you know, through the bad times, that's the opportunities, man. I know.
Yeah.
I'm excited about it.
This is the first, you know, I've only farmed four years, but this is the first, I'll call it downturn that I've seen. Yeah. Just watching equipment land prices. So even over it, like I'm, I'm like, Holy crap. This is like, there's some equipment that's selling at 30 to 50% of dealer list price on auctions this summer. And then land, even in our area, I mean,
It's honestly down 15% to 30% on a lot of sales compared to last year that were 18,000 or whatever.
Even though the Land Expo didn't quite say that, but there's a lot more moving off, not on auctions, and there's a lot more no sales I've seen.
Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly.
Dave sitting here, he'd say he has to work harder. He hasn't had – not just him alone. Auctioneers haven't had those easy breezy, I'm going to come in knowing this farm's selling today.
Yeah, yeah.
You had to put a lot more marketing effort into it. You had to work a lot harder as an auctioneer. You had to develop a lot more relationships.
I do want to go into that with him sometime because I was like, at what point did reserves come into the history of auctions? Because I thought normally you had an auction and it's like, this is going to sell. And that's why I literally heard – It was Steffes at the Farm for Profit Conference. Oh, yeah, a long time ago. I literally heard him say, why do people go to an auction?
Because they think they're going to get a deal. And now they started using auctions as, no, because you're going to get the highest price. And if it doesn't sell for the price that you want, then, oh, we'll just won't sell it because we have a reserve. We're going to sit back and wait. It's like, well, then why did I come?
I love picking on Dave when he's not here.
So I want to dive into that with him sometime. the history of auction.
Yeah. Uh, I mean, so Spencer just bought a farm from Dave and that was, that was a no sale. And that was Dave had to get a job done kind of, and that was, it went no sale at auction kind of. And I feel like we're, we're seeing a ton of those. It feels like on some of those.
So yeah, your brother has a separate YouTube channel.
Yeah, yeah. And he's, dude, he's way better at YouTube than I am. So I have him, he's gotten so good where I have him just do my, like, on the real life channel, he edits all those videos. He's setting the camera there when we're out there. Because one of the hardest parts is when you're farming to get the camera set down and stuff. And, you know, when we're out there farming, I'm like, why that?
Why the heck are you spending a bunch of time setting up that camera? And then when you go back and watch the video or the clips, it's like, thank God he set the camera there or something like that. And so he gets views to go viral somehow. He had one get 7 million views, and he's figured that out a lot better than I have.
He's doing a great job of explaining it. So not only do I not play...
video games or farming simulator i don't i'm i don't consume i consume podcasts i don't consume like youtube videos like long i consume shorts and things like that so i've never sat down and watched you know a full zach johnson millennial farmer video right i've watched parts of it here and there i actually have sat down and watched your brothers yes and and i did not intend to what was it
I think it was Soybean Harvest or something while you guys were doing it. It literally popped up while I was doing something and I'm like, I'll watch a little bit of this. I will always watch a little bit, but I just don't ever have 30 minutes or whatever. I watched the whole damn thing.
We're going to have to cut that out because we know that Zach listens to every one of our episodes.
I'll tell Zach. I'll call him right now. I'll be like, dude, I've never seen one of your shows. But I thoroughly enjoy Zach as a person. I thoroughly enjoy his content on the shorts and all that. Oh, my God.
Rachel's reaction on the TV was hilarious. She's like, what are you saying?
And why are you saying it?
I love Zach, and I love his content. It's great. What is that? There's got to be a word for that. I'm fully aware of how important and how awesome he is, but I just don't consume anybody's. It's not because it sucks.
Spencer's not even talking much there. He's just getting a bunch of the shots and stuff that are like, oh, that's an interesting deal.
It is, but he has some explanation at the beginning or whatever. Yeah.
To me, I thought it was great. So the two of you don't buy farms together? Like you're not in partnerships when it comes to real life farming?
No. So like I own, besides XFITR, I think I own all the equipment. And so I own three farms. He owns two. Basically, he gets to run all the equipment for free on his ground. He helps me on any of the land I own and a bunch of other stuff. Right.
But I just think that's interesting. I applaud you for separating it out because you would think the easy route is let's pool our dollars and let's go do this together or buy more together. And this gives you that autonomy to, I like this fun. This one, I'm going to go get it rather than needing permission to go get it. Is he a partner on your mobile game?
No, no, no. He doesn't own any equity or anything, but he helps a ton. He'll advertise in the YouTube videos and stuff like that.
So do you have to buy that ad spot?
No, no, I don't.
It's part of the free equipment, right?
Exactly, exactly, exactly.
That's an interesting dynamic because not everybody could make that work.
Exactly, yeah. I feel like as brothers, we get along really good where... how will this work when we're, you know, 30 years older, but we, uh, uh, we don't like, I don't know. We're not counting totals. It's like, if I need to help him for a day, I'm, I'm helping him for a day. If he needs to help me, he's helping me any, any stuff like that. He's always helping.
It's truly, um, I mean, yes, your family, but the mentality of not trying to tear someone down, like if we can just all succeed together, right. That rising tide raises all boats. Like, Once you get that mentality, I mean, the options and the sky is the limit, right?
Exactly, exactly, yeah.
It's crazy. So I love to hear that. My brother needs to help me out like that. Yes, he needs to come in and start editing. They dropped me off here because I wasn't going to get here on time, and they went and got my truck and brought it back for me.
It's one of those scenes, even if we're cursing at each other like a terrible day, an hour later, it's like, totally forget about that. Don't even have to say anything. Totally forget about that. I don't know. It's a pretty good relationship, I'll say.
That is so great. I don't want to say you're lucky, but you're lucky.
Yeah.
Because it's tough for any team, whether it's a team of employees or siblings, to have a position to where there's a lack of jealousy, there's a lack of power struggle. It is, let's just go kick ass.
So revenue streams, YouTube inserts ads. If you just get a lot of viewers, they're inserting ads. That's a big one. We all know that, right? Yep. the American farming, I would say, is that a subscription yearly?
So that is, um, it costs seven 99 to purchase. And then we have a lot of in-app purchases. Ah, yep. One of those are average users. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly.
Okay.
Yep.
And with that, does that come like brand? Is there brand partnerships in there?
No. So we have a bunch of companies licensed to use their equipment, but there's no money exchanged between any of them. It's value on each side of that.
So if someone... What am I trying to think of? There's a certain brand of grain cart that wants to be in the game. Yep. Do they have to pay you to get in the game?
I'm talking both Farm Simulator and... Farm Sim is a little different where they got to find modders. But for us... For us, no, no, not at all. But we have a lot of cost incur on that side because some of these models to build these things gets real like it, like half of the team is art related where they'll build these models, you know, basically from scratch.
So like one of our, like the, one of our biggest tractors in the game, literally, and there's some dev cost factored into building this model, but it literally cost me more to build this model than my real life planner cost me in farming. It's like, but that was a crazy, that was a pretty crazy model, but it's like, we do it right and we want to get it perfect.
And so it gets expensive, it gets expensive building these models. Like artists spent two, three months building that thing. So it took, it took a while.
So the Maya corn head that we want to get in your game, we just got to ask.
We can get it in. We can get it in. Especially, and it works really good if they have like 3D models they send us. Usually if they're lower poly, it works pretty good to get them in game.
So like we could exchange a Maya corn head real life for a Maya corn head in the game.
Maybe. Maybe. I was just thinking even, like, how did the Bush Light Combine get in there? Like, someone had to put that in there, right?
Gosh, and I texted you about that. I don't remember who got that in there, but I saw that, and I used it. And the video got, like, half a million views. Like, people loved that thing.
Yeah, you sent it to me, because I'm pretty sure it was even a 9770, wasn't it? Yep, yep. Because there's several other non-9770... I was the only 9770 Bush Light Combine. And he sent that to me. I'm like, this is awesome. You guys were going to the dealership and all that. Role playing. That's kind of cool.
Yeah. You know what we need to do? We need to get an American Farming wrapped 780. And then it goes right back into the game. There you go. Then you can... Get an American Farming Wrap at $7.80.
There we go. We just need to get John Deere in there, though. I got to get John Deere in there first. They're not in there yet? They're not in there.
What do we need to do to help out with that?
They're tough. They're tough to get in, man. It's challenging. It's funny because you'll see kids will come up to you like, Grant, have you ever thought about getting John Deere in-game? No, I never have. Never have. I have all John Deere equipment. That would be great. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we're working on it.
Never thought of that.
Well, just so you know, the reach of this podcast, they're going to knock on your door.
What we found with John Deere is it's usually just getting past the gatekeepers, and then once you're there, it's way easier. Yeah, we haven't gotten past that gate yet. We'll get you there. We'll get you there. What about... I've always had this question. I think I might have asked you last time here. Is there music? Like, can you listen to the radio?
Okay. In Farming Simulator, you can. You can do whatever you want. In American Farming, there might be some licensing stuff, restrictions, because, you know, we're selling... We'd basically be selling that game.
So you're... Yeah, you're mobile. So say you got, like, your AirPods or your Beats in. What are you... Is it, like, tractor sounds?
Yeah. It's all tractor sounds. And a lot of them are, honestly, recorded, so... Right in Nevada there, there's C&H, so we'll go out and record every single tractor out in that C&H Industrial Center lot. Really? So I'll fly my audio guy out there. I'll go drive whatever, and we'll just go record those out there.
It's pretty cool. What are you doing today? Oh, we're just recording tractor sounds. All I'm doing is revving it up and putting it down.
Exactly. They'll give you a key. It's that half a million dollar machine. You fire it up and get every...
I was going to say, so are you the guy that's out mowing the front yard right before they bail it? I'm always like, why is this guy mowing it right now? It's probably just Grant out there getting audio.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then the other audio sounds will just come from like when I'm combine. I'll just go throw the combine out. I mean, we filmed so much that we got that audio from the YouTube side. I'll steal it sometimes. Yeah.
What if... I'm trying to think. You don't want to give away licensing for a song, but I'm just trying to think. If you already had a Spotify subscription, could you run that through the game and it just goes through Spotify or something like that?
Do you see where he's going with this? Yeah, I see it. You see where he's going?
Yeah, but I've got to go this way.
You're taking a really long route.
No, I'm curious for songs too, though. I think you guys could get in there. So on Farm Sim, you could easily get in there. On American Farm, as long as we had your permission, we could technically get you in there, basically.
How cool would that be? You just want a real experience of a real farmer. Real farmers listen to Farm for Profit, so you should be listening while you're playing the game.
Well, what I think of, so like I said, I do consume podcasts. And when I'm out in the fields, right, I love music. I have literally TRL, Tractor Request Line, and I will play music. But there's a certain point where, like, I have spent 16 hours here. I'm tired of music, and I need to exercise my brain and just listen to people's thoughts. Sometimes it's on farming. Sometimes it's Joe Rogan.
Sometimes it's something completely out there, and it's Call Her Daddy or something ridiculous.
I got into freaking murder mysteries the other day. I just checked out.
Sometimes it's just you need something in your brain that you can think about that just doesn't turn your brain to mush. Yeah. Yeah, so why would it not be the same when you're playing hours on end of Farming Simulator?
Yeah, and I think on Farming Simulator, a lot of people, like I've done this, I'll just open another tab while I'm playing or something, and you can pull it up on Spotify or something like that.
Or a lot of people go live now. Like that Kyle on TikTok? Oh, yep. Or what is the live streaming gaming platform? Stitcher?
Twitch.
Twitch, that's right. We are so old.
Yeah, I've never been on Twitch or anything. It's literally just been YouTube.
I can't imagine. I mean, that to me feels like it would be another revenue stream for you, but... then it's live.
Yeah.
Everything you're doing is live. There's no cuts. There's no action. There's no crap that didn't work.
Yep. Exactly. It's like, you got to be there the whole time. We're on YouTube. There's videos that are four years old that are still pulling in a lot of views and we'll just get randomly recommended. And so it's almost very passively. That's a lot.
That's what everybody wants to do.
Yeah.
Make it while you sleep. Yep.
That's the definition of passive income, right?
Just have to be while you're sleeping.
It has to just be every minute of the day while you're not doing that. Yeah. But if it's while you're sleeping, it's even better. It feels better.
Absolutely. So you mentioned it again. For the third time in this episode, we haven't talked about it yet. We're recording this before TikTok. Officially, unofficially, whatever is going to happen. It is Friday, January 17th when we're recording this. What is your gut feeling on what the future of TikTok looks like?
And for full transparency, because I'm a planning person, this episode airs January 30th. Yeah. So for our listeners...
We may not even know the full extent of it at this point or when this airs, but we can guess.
See, I just consume TikTok. I don't make any content, but I still follow a lot of people in it. But I honestly don't know much about the band, but it's like I would place my bets on that it doesn't happen if I had placed my odds. But that's with very little merit behind that.
So does your team make content? No. There's no American farming.
Sorry, there is American Farming TikTok for social media. Personally, like on real life content, I don't have any. We also do on the squad content. We'll post some farms and videos. But that's, I guess, other people on my team posting those.
I mean, there's been – all TikTok is right now is just my thread is flooded with people saying, oh, sorry. It's been great. It's been kind of cool to see some of the flashbacks. Right, right. But like Justin Danger Nunley and Shiloh and all that, like – And they're all kind of down and out, but really we all know they're winners, right? Like even if TikTok does go away, they're going to be fine.
And the eyeballs aren't leaving. Do you follow that girl that comes like sliding? She's got to have the slickest wood floors ever, but she's always almost like a risky business sliding into the frame. I don't think I do. And then she zooms in on it and like, this is what you need to know today. And zooms out. I don't think I do. Oh.
So TikTok's going to be wiped if it's not bought by a U.S. company, basically.
That's what they're saying. In the last 24 hours, we've even had ups and downs because Rachel sent us a KCCI, or no, you sent us a KCCI deal last night that said Biden administration is just going to let the Trump administration, they're not going to ban it, they're just going to let the Trump administration handle it. They're not enforcing the penalties.
But then immediately today, the Supreme Court has upheld their ruling, but the Biden administration is saying that they're not going to enforce the penalties. So even though the Supreme Court says the penalty is $5,000 per user, to the owner of the app store that allows it to be downloaded, to the platforms. That's the no-no.
Okay, that's a lot of money because that's $850 billion worth of penalties if it stays live. The Biden administration has announced today that they are not going to enforce the monetary penalty. They're going to defer that to the Trump administration.
Gotcha.
So if you're Oracle or you're Apple and this is your app store and you're sitting there going, okay, how much do I trust what the administration is telling me? Do I still let this be live on Monday to be downloaded or do I shut it off? Can't download it again on Monday until I get more clarification from the Trump administration. That's where we're sitting right now.
It's per new download.
Because it's supposed to, correct. It'll stay active. If it's on your device, you will still have access to your account. However, how long until bugs take over it or it becomes not user-friendly because you can't re-update it. It's not in the app store anymore. So it'll function just how long until it becomes a pile of crap.
Gotcha. I think my favorite content spurring from all this is the saying goodbye to your Chinese spy.
But that's why I think it's going to survive. I think it's going to be a hiatus of a couple of days, maybe a week or so, and it's going to come back because the alternatives, what they're seeing happen is you're just migrating to another Mandarin app or your red note.
There's not a good alternative option except for we heard it this morning that potentially this is the bolstering of X. There's going to be an announcement coming out.
Gotcha. If X put some emphasis on the short form content and long form, which they have, it's just not TikTok-esque, but kind of like YouTube shorts and Instagram Reels, I think Twitter would be a pretty dang good place again.
Yeah. X. I would say if Biden banned it or got rid of it right before Trump, Trump has something to come in and save the day with. He needs something to come in and save the day with. Well, I guess you kind of look at the China side too, but that's why it's interesting with him.
I do think it was way too big of a player in U.S. politics on both sides of the aisle that it's like – I mean, I get it. We don't need Chinese spying on us, but at the end of the day, if they're not doing it, our own country is on meta and everything else. People are spying, no matter what. So, it's... Kind of scary, really.
But it's what also gives us our livelihood to be able to do some of the stuff by ground and weather these down times. So we don't want to set the precedence that we can just tear this away.
Yep. So in the last 365 days, Farm for Profits page alone has had just shy of 20 million views on TikTok. Grant gets out in like a week on TikTok.
I get that. 20 million views on TikTok. On TikTok. What about you? Do you know YouTube?
Well, I can get into it. Just to stay on the TikTok train for right now, just the sheer fact that that is minuscule.
Very.
Compared to what some of these other accounts are continuing to gather and those like Justin Danger Nunley, who's a friend of the show, has as far as generating a livelihood. Okay. He has skills he can go back to. My wife was telling me that she works right now at a company that doesn't know that I exist. She knows she has a husband, but not that anything that we do is online or public.
That's her choice to be private. So there's a lot of discussions about, well, they just need to go get a real job. If they had real talent, they should go out and put things together. And it's again kind of like the initial conversation about ag influencers is they don't realize that this has become real jobs for real people. It's another division of marketing.
Whether you put it in a magazine and you design an ad that goes there or you write an article that goes in a blog or Social media is another avenue.
Yeah. And you could go get it. You have skills to go get a job. Oh, absolutely. This is a force multiplier of network and just experiences. Like, we get invited to the table of things that we would never have ever gotten invited to. Yeah. We would have never been down at the Land Expo if we weren't doing that.
We wouldn't have met you, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I mean, maybe. And business is done with being an Ankeny kid. We probably would have crossed paths, but boy. And business is done with relationships. I mean, you could be a freaking astronaut. It doesn't matter if I don't like you.
Yeah, and even if, say, Tanner, okay, say you went and got a job at a company. Well, the most effective thing you'd probably be doing is running some type of marketing or something just because of all the experience you have now with marketing and stuff. That's the highest leverage job you'd probably be doing.
It literally is going to be one-dimensional, right? Like you're going to go get paid a really good salary, which is fine. If you want that for your life, there is nothing wrong with that because you can go home and shut it off at the end of the day. We can't.
It is wild. If you are a person – that is interested at all in personal development, dive into social media. Because you learn a lot of things from business management. Obviously, we hope all of our listeners on Farm for Profit are working on their business management skills because we want them to run their farm more like a business. but you learn very quickly marketing.
And not only does that make you better as a consumer, because now you understand why brands are marketing to you the way they're marketing to you, but now you can kind of dissect some of the messaging that comes your direction. But you also kind of get a world economic view as far as that goes. I mean, if I wasn't doing this, and obviously TikTok going away isn't killing Farm for Profit.
That's not the point. There's a reason we are on every platform and we're everywhere that our listeners want to find us is just for that reason. But yes, every one of these individuals that could be jeopardized by this ruling or this decision that administrations are going to make, they've got skills. They're real people that can apply to real business, can translate to other platforms.
Yes, they blew up on one, but there's some skills in there. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. You ready to move on from this? Did we beat it to death?
We beat it hard. Did we?
We'll see if it comes back. Hopefully it comes back. Either way. I mean, if you're listening to this and you found us on TikTok, go to another platform.
I mean, TikTok was a... It wasn't what made us, but it certainly was a trajectory. It helped us. It's no question that... We were on Twitter and Facebook, Instagram. We weren't on Instagram. We weren't on Instagram. I didn't know how to do that until Rachel showed up. But we were on there, and we didn't have that much traction.
And we went to TikTok because we knew it from our personal channels, and it did help us kind of get to that next level.
Which is wild because YouTube is one of those platforms also that has bolstered the shorts and stuff.
Yeah. And it's funny. If you go look at maybe some of your TikTok or YouTube shorts – Pick out one of them that went viral, and you'll see this on a lot of podcasts. It's like, where's the link to the full podcast? And it's like everybody just wants to go to the podcast and listen to it after they hear that viral short or comment or whatever.
I actually had a question on getting paid on YouTube. Yeah. So they call it KPM, which is cost per 1,000 views. Right, since that makes a lot of sense.
KPM. KPM, yep. Are you spelling Carl? RPM, Dave.
RPM, revenue per million. Revenue, that's what it is. Or 1,000, sorry.
You get it. You sound like Dave. I can spell names right.
And I was just looking at ours the other day, and it's a different number. It's a lot bigger number for long form than it is for the shorts.
Yeah, yours is really low on shorts.
Is that a set rate, or can you affect that?
It's all based on your content. So the highest, at least of what I knew two years ago, the highest would be like if you made investing content or something like that. Um, there's a Graham Stephan that makes a lot of finance and I think so. Yeah. Finance and stuff like that.
Like he's got the hot, one of the highest RPMs, the lowest, um, will be obviously your shorts cause it's tough to run ads on there. Uh, what else would be lowest? Like if you had a bunch of overseas viewers, out of country viewers, that's the U S always has the highest CPM. Um, so I'm somewhere I'd be like right in the middle. Some of the real life farming content is pretty high. Um,
And it's all an auction-based system where a lot of these companies are just there's only a certain amount of investing videos that you can get out on YouTube, but there's a lot of people that can make a lot of money on running investing ads. And so a bunch of people are just chasing after that investing ad. So that's why that's literally the highest RPM on YouTube.
And so when you say content, it's more based like what genre?
What genre?
Yeah, you're in because obviously investing would be people with money. And so if you did an ad there, maybe...
have a lot more money that could come in and in long form too if you have like a two or three hour video and you and you lay like 30 ads on there or something like that that's where uh you make a lot of you make a lot of money so spencer he had a like three hour video i'm only saying this because he put it he put it in his video and it went viral it got like seven million views and uh three
hour video like a three hour video got like seven million views there's a lot of movies that don't get that did you watch the full one over that or no not the no okay but he put it in his channel and that that one video made like 120 grand that one video made like 120 grand because he layered ads in there and a bunch of people enjoyed the content and it went viral sure um and then farming the farming content is kind of goes viral too so one video so i selected that we've got 31 million views this last year
Okay, yep.
A lot of them are shorts, probably. Oh, yeah.
Like 98% of them are shorts. It seems a lot easier to get a lot more views on shorts, obviously.
And we design a lot of clips. Kiowa does a great job where we design that type of clip that wants to drive you to the full episode. Go to Spotify and listen here. Go to these other platforms. And that's interesting.
But we never created the shorts to make revenue. It was always just to tease the episode.
We haven't done any of this to make revenue.
Yeah, and to get people back to listen to the full show. Exactly.
Yeah. But I'm glad that you challenged me to look it up because holy – Yeah. $31 million. I mean, probably nothing compared to what your channel does. However, holy crap.
Yeah. Like the squad channel, that only gets like – I don't do any shorts, but that's only like – two to five billion views a month. So you're probably getting more views a month with the shorts and stuff.
Right, just shorts. Yeah. But isn't that wild when you think about, again, the whole argument of what is an influencer? And again, no matter who you are, I don't care if you're an influencer or not. Nobody loves that word.
Yeah.
Maybe some politicians, but that's absolutely nothing. It's just what you get labeled. And until we can change the labeling, that's just what you get. Yeah. But never would have imagined.
It's a wild world. And you shouldn't hate because of it. It's just something that someone we figured out. You can do it too.
I will tell you, maybe it's the same for you. It gives you a hell of a perspective. Like there's not a single person anymore that emails us, texts us, that says, I want to be on your show. Or I think this person would be a good guest. Nothing gets dismissed. Gotcha. At least for me. And I probably, waste is going to be the wrong word. I probably spend too much time considering it.
Yep, yep, yep.
But we keep a list. Rachel and I have got a list as long as... This podcast won't die for lack of content.
Yeah, no, that won't be the killer.
No. Because everybody has a unique story, a unique pitch. Is it going to be timely? Is it applicable? Yeah. It's amazing when you look at that. But it really has gotten to the point to where... I don't look at anybody with a first judgment. Let's learn who you are. Hell, I feel so bad to an extent that we interviewed Lacey Evans, and she's got the Feral Cowboy podcast.
And I didn't know what to expect before we started. She's got blue hair. And large Instagram following. She hugs cows. I had some of the most fun doing that interview. And we're going to continue to work with her. Yep. But on TikTok, she got less views than I get on my personal TikTok.
Gotcha.
It's a stereotype. Yep. You see somebody with colored hair in agriculture and you go, who's this? Yeah, yeah. Which is too bad. Mm-hmm. I would encourage you. If you as a listener didn't listen to that show, go back and listen to that show. That's a good one. That's a good one.
Do you have a TerraClear in your game?
I don't.
Did you see that they just got on Farm Sim?
Some otter probably did that. Probably added it. Yeah. I've seen them out going, though, for a neighbor. And I talked about it in my video as I've seen them going and stuff. But TerraClear was going.
So you and Spencer need to have them out to your farm. Just for content? We'll help you out with that. It's so cool.
And I went from an area that didn't have any rocks to an area that guys are like, watch for rocks. And I didn't know that before I bought that first farm, even in this area. I didn't realize rocks were in this area.
Yeah, they yeet rocks, that's all I can say. But it is so cool, that technology. Yeah. Turning something so dumb as a rock into using technology to yeet it into the bucket. Yeah.
Rachel just texted us and said we need to make this interview three hours long so that way we can put it on YouTube and it'll go viral and we can just make all the money.
All right, I know how to do that. So you're into... Bitcoin.
Okay. Right.
So we haven't even talked about that. When did, when did the cryptocurrency come, come into play for you?
Uh, like 2017, 2016.
So before you started doing all the content on YouTube.
Yeah. Kind of, kind of right around that timeframe. Yeah. I'd say, um, Yeah, I think I've said this multiple times, but the guy that really got me into it was Mr. Beast at the time, back in, like, 2017. He was the one that, like, first explained it and stuff.
Corey's looking at his beer. It's dirty on the top.
What did you do to it? No, no, no. You know what that's from? Is that from the meat?
That's from the salsa that I made for the tailgate.
This beer's really old.
Sorry.
Gross. Smell it. Smell the salsa. I'm not smelling it. Do it.
No. Do it.
I don't know if I trust that.
It'll be all right. It's alcohol. It'll kill any germs. Sorry to interrupt you. Keep going, Mr. Beast.
No, yeah, yeah. Back in 2017. It's just when we first kind of got into it.
And so you started just buying, mining.
So we started buying, yeah, in 2017. And you mess around with all sorts of altcoins. And then 2018 bear market happens. And then that's really when the learning stage takes place. And you start learning more about Bitcoin. It's like, okay, Bitcoin is a real thing. Some of these altcoins just pump on some of Bitcoin's bull markets. Pump and dump. Yeah, exactly.
And then we started – it was right after college. Right when I graduated college, we bought – some Bitcoin miners in Grundy Center. And so we bought those miners and we actually just, we just actually exited them a couple weeks ago, actually. The mining? Yeah, yeah, mining.
So we had... So were you in with... JP.
So, yeah, JP, yeah. So I know JP pretty well, yeah. So his site, so he... JP Barrett. Yeah. Yeah, he – which I listened to that. That was a super good podcast.
But he – That's something else too. We were talking about places to go. We still haven't gone to go see it.
He runs – he like built that site and then we just invest in the miners. We buy those miners and then we put them on his site basically. And so we – Those miners eventually get old, just like a laptop. You're not using a six-year-old laptop anymore versus the new technology. So then we sold those miners, or we got them out of there two or three weeks ago.
And the idea is just to sell them when Bitcoin miners are at high price here, kind of in the bull market here. And so, yeah, in that mind... That mine, it's crazy. That mine actually, so we pulled our miners from there like three weeks ago. And probably a week ago, I get a text from a buddy. And it's like a KCCI article. And that whole mine burned down. JP's whole mine burned.
burned down and he did a whole twitter thread about it kind of how it happened how do we miss this yeah it's on like news stations it's uh uh but a space heater burned a majority of that mine down space heater why did they need space exactly exactly yeah yeah that's what a lot of comments were that one employee that was just their toes were cold
yeah but luckily it was like maybe rachel it was like half the mine i think rachel says she needs this dumbed down how does one even mine a bitcoin that is a whole nother show actually go back and listen to jp jp barracks now i need yeah we need to circle back you guys had vance vance crowe on too which probably explained it pretty well so i want i do want to say on the vance crowe's new project um what does he call it the uh the news show
Oh. Tribes?
Tribes. The tribe report.
Yeah. So I want to say I am the mastermind behind the Bitcoin per acre segment. Yeah, I saw that. Yeah. He never gives me credit for it. He never gives me credit for it. So I always like jab him on Twitter.
Okay, so we're going to hold you accountable here. Has the Bitcoin per acre, has that peaked? Will farmland only be cheaper in the future? Per Bitcoin. Per Bitcoin. Denominated in Bitcoin. Okay.
No, because I think Bitcoin, if it continues like everyone says it's going to, right, to a quarter million, like 250, right? That's kind of the – I think that will appreciate faster than land. Land's a long-term tredge forward higher. Okay.
So farmland has peaked out, theoretically, you could argue. It's peaked out. In its comparison. It'll only get cheaper when denominated in Bitcoin.
Denominated to Bitcoin. Until Bitcoin reaches its finality or whatever.
Gotcha, yeah, yeah.
And then only at that time could we ever know the true ratio, right? And track it. Yep, yep. Because they're moving at different speeds right now with inflation and all that. Yeah. It is very interesting to look at things like that. We looked at Rolex per acre. We looked at some popular Rolex watch. a hedge against inflation versus land. Yep.
And it is crazy that like the Rolex Submariner, um, actually outperform land there for, for a while, right. Going up. Like, so you look at certain like hedges against inflation and things like that. It's, it's, it's nuts, but yeah, Bitcoin's hard to fricking wrap your mind around.
Yeah. I just told Rachel in the chat that you mind Bitcoin with a pickaxe. Yeah. It's good that she can't talk.
We just get her reactions. So anyway, you have these Bitcoin miners. The mine is gone now.
Yeah, that mine's gone.
But you're not going to reinvest?
Why wouldn't you reinvest? No, so... I don't mean to diss on any Bitcoin miners, but what we found out was that mining or owning Bitcoin gets you very close to the same return as mining. And you have a physical thing. You have to insure that physical thing. Sometimes... is it theft? I think theft or something doesn't cover under insurance.
Some of these insurance companies are very skeptical about insuring Bitcoin Myers. And so we found out it's like for the risk you take the reward, there's not as much upside. You're getting close to the same return as owning the thing. And so that's where it's like those big miners. I mean, there's a lot of miners down in like Texas, um, and some of these regions that they're at large scale.
It's one of those things where if you can scale it really big, I think you're making a lot of money mining, but if you can't scale it big, uh, I think you're better off just owning the asset itself. So that's what we've kind of learned, and so that's where we're going.
That makes sense, yeah. It's like farming. It's literally like farming in a little bit of a way. You've got to take your inputs and get them extremely low, lower than anybody else can get them. And you got to be able to do it when it's a high price.
Yep. It's, it's yeah. Bitcoin's like a hundred percent true capitalism. It's a true commodity. Like it's, everything is, and the two week difficulty adjustment. So if a bunch of Bitcoin, if a bunch of Bitcoin miners jump on the network because the price is going higher, just like in farming, right. It gets, it actually gets tougher for the existing Bitcoin miners on two week difficulty adjustment.
So that's, It's the exact same thing as growing a commodity or farming.
So do you own any altcoins then?
I don't. I don't. I only own Bitcoin. Although, like, this cycle, this is kind of a prediction, but a lot of these altcoins will pump towards the end of a crypto cycle like crazy. I don't think there's much merit in them, but I bet you there's way better upside owning some alts than Bitcoin on these cycles.
Well, I think we learned that. Yeah. 2016, right? An altcoin could go up 100% or 200%, 300% in a day or two. Yeah, yeah. You know? So...
I don't fully understand the process of creating an altcoin, but is there an altcoin for agriculture?
I think anybody could just create something for agriculture.
Is there one by the Loctua coin? No, I did not. But it got me thinking, right? Do we need an ag coin?
For what use case, though? I don't know.
Well, I'm not going to share that. I don't think it's a coin.
I don't think it's a coin. But blockchain, the technology, right?
I'm talking about coin.
Farm for profit. Why don't we talk to the ag world? Pump a dope. Yeah. Are you prepared to disappear? No. No. That's just an interesting concept. But the technology, I think, for ag and the tracking of commodities and... meat and all that, like it's there. And it just, I think I'm excited for that side of it. How do you take profits? Do you take profits or are you just a hold forever?
Yeah, I guess I've kind of viewed it where Bitcoin runs on four-year cycles, and I still haven't figured out why. There's a lot of theories to why it runs on four-year cycles, but it's extremely cyclical. And so you'll have bear markets where it'll fall 60%, 70%, 80%, and then you'll have that euphoria stage at the end of a four-year cycle where everybody and their grandmother's buying this thing.
And it just keeps repeating. And so we'll take a little bit of profit, but... Everybody who's taken profit on Bitcoin and who hasn't gotten back in has regretted it to this day. And so I think you got to kind of play dumb and just play that trend for the long term. And some of it, I'll go down with the ship for sure. I want to see where this thing ends up.
I want to see if it ends up as a global reserve currency because that's the ultimate, that's the ultimate bull case for it. And I think... over the next 30, 50 years, there's merit for Bitcoin being one of the global reserve currencies of the world.
Because there's only a finite amount of Bitcoin.
Yep, 21 million. But, I mean, you have Trump. Trump's in here saying, hey, the amount of Bitcoin that U.S. owns, we're going to hold that as a reserve. And then he hasn't said specifically he's going to buy more from that. But it's like if you're...
United States government that has the reserve currency right now game theory suggests why wouldn't you just why wouldn't you just own it or buy it just so you're ahead if other countries if other countries start buying the same all right so for our listeners explain game theory on the spot I'll help you if one person does this what are you gonna if one person does this move what's your move I guess is the basic way of explaining game theory
Yeah, theory of the mathematical models that are of strategic interactions. Its applications can be in the fields of social sciences and is extensively studying for taking advantage of or putting yourself in the prime position, right?
Yeah. I mean, if you're playing the computer in chess, right, you can kind of – if I move here, that is going to trigger the – computer to move this here, and then I'm going to checkmate, you know, whatever. But what I found interesting when we were hanging out with our buddy Kyle Bass earlier this week, he didn't have too many good things to say about
crypto and wasn't it wasn't the other guy though or was kyle that way i kind of i guess it was a theme like it felt like that whole morning session was like where they were against uh green energy they were for nuclear and they weren't very friendly crypto
Yeah, I didn't hear what Kyle said about it, but what was the other guy, the Big Short guy?
I totally blanked on his name. Oh, from the con?
Yeah, he was against it. He was against it.
From the movie Big Short or from the Land Expo? He was the story. The story of the Big Short, the movie, was on that guy. Yeah, Tanner wasn't there.
Yeah, he skipped. Wall Street guru Michael Burry realizes the number of subprime loans. Burry bets his housing market, throwing more than $1 billion in investors.
Was that it? No.
The attention of the banker Jared Burnett, played by Ryan Gosling, hedge fund specialist Mark Baum, played by Steve Carell, and other greedy opportunists. Together they make a fortune.
Gotcha. Yeah, no, it was – I forgot the guy's name.
But anyways – I have a picture of the agenda. I'll get it.
Gotcha. But anyways, yeah, it's super interesting to see how it will play out. It's because you've had a lot of great macro investors that have been against it and then they've flipped. And really the only great macro investor is like Warren Buffett. I would say that's against it who hasn't flipped or Charlie Munger who passed away.
Was he the before launch or after launch?
Before. It was like Michael something. And so I think for the... Steve Eisman? Steve Eisman, yep. Steve Eisman. But yeah, he was against it. It's funny because at the expo I had a bunch of people texting me like, see, you got to listen to this guy and stuff. It'll be interesting though.
It was interesting.
It was good.
What do you got left on your little notebook there? Uh... Where's the future going? Are you just going to keep doing what you're doing and just buy all the land, or you got other things up your sleeve? Hoddle. Hoddle? Hoddle? Hoddle.
How do you say that? Hoddle. Hoddle, yeah. Hopefully slowly expand the farming operation. I would say we haven't – so we went – I mean, we only rent 100 more acres than we own, so we don't rent much ground. We're pretty small. So the goal is just to kind of expand slowly there and then just keep –
On the Squad Built, the software company side, just keep adding more content, working on more projects there. And the YouTube side, keep going on that. Nothing crazy.
I think, you know, if you wanted to ride this wave, you should just rent your land to them and get in on the actual YouTube side, and that's where the money's at. That's true. It would be, like, opposite. Like, they want to come and just make money on the... And Corey wants to be the agent in the middle. Yeah. I don't care how the money gets in the account, I guess. Just get in there.
That's what, yeah. Starting next year, Corey's not going to be a farmer on the podcast anymore. He's just going to rent his land to Grant.
Yeah.
Yep.
There we go.
I had a lot of fun.
Yeah.
And I told Corey I wasn't going to cut this off at an hour.
You didn't. Hour 16 on Rachel's timer.
We're not quite to 5 o'clock yet because nobody knows when we started. Rachel's shaking her head. She hates my jokes. It's just to spend all next week with us. This is going to be hilarious. I'm excited for the conversations we get to have after the mics turn off.
I mean, I appreciate you sharing your story again with our listeners and giving us an idea of where you've come and your perspective on a lot of different things that we covered today.
Yeah.
It's been fun. You got anything for us? I mean...
questions any questions or where's dave that's why i wondered when i walked in yeah yes we have to answer that way too much uh he is at the minnesota auctioneers association is it telling though the number of companies organizations trade shows that ask for a keynote speaker and they ask for dave they don't ask for cory they don't ask for tanner i don't give it to him as an option
I don't think you get asked.
No, I don't. I did get asked to do a comedy bit one time.
That was kind of funny. Yeah. You wouldn't have been funny, but that was kind of funny. But no, that's where he's at. I mean, the man gets asked. I bet he could spend four days a week giving keynotes. Just his knowledge in land values, the auctioneering side of things, his entrepreneurship. If you take every category the man is an expert in, yeah, he could...
He could find a home if he wanted to spend that much time doing it.
Mm-hmm. Got it.
So we will carry the brunt of the load. There we go. Nah, we'll have more fun than Dave. Now, again, a pleasure of ours. If our listeners want to follow you, want to download the game, how best do they go about doing that?
Yeah. Squad on YouTube. Grant Hilbert on YouTube also for the real-life content. And then the game's just on iOS and Android. Just American Farming. So...
I love it. Well, I appreciate you being here. Corey, what do you tell the listeners? Crack gold one. You deserve it.