Young Farmer Makes History, Uses Video Games and YouTube to Buy $1.8M Land
After a year-long wait, Grant Hilbert and his company, SquadBuilt, released American Farming on Nov. 24, 2023. Here's a look back at his journey to become a gamer, social media influencer and farmer.
Who buys farmland for $1.8 million with video game money? At 15 years young, Grant Hilbert started a YouTube farm gaming channel in his bedroom, grinded for seven years to gain 1.3 million followers, bought 250 acres of Iowa black dirt, and made history as the first person to break into farming via video games.
Hilbert’s story is a stunner. He is not a traditional gamer, nor a social media influencer, but simply a corn and soybean farmer with vision — several steps ahead of a rollicking online marketplace where a ravenous public feeds its fascination for all things farming. U.S. agriculture, he believes, is in the beginning stages of a paradigm shift of access: “If I was able to do it, then any kid with drive should be able to do it.”
With one foot in the crop rows and another in gaming, Hilbert, 24, operates two YouTube channels and is just hitting business stride at the helm of a company preparing to release a groundbreaking video game, American Farming, aimed at the heart of Midwest agriculture.
Ready player one.
1 Million Passengers
Prior to the online gaming explosion or the debut of YouTube, in the ancient age of PlayStation 1 and Nintendo 64, Hilbert was born in 1998 — one generation removed from corn and soybeans. Raised in the suburbs of Ankeny, roughly 20 miles above Des Moines, in central Iowa, Hilbert’s neck perpetually craned north to the flat farmland of his grandparents and uncles, two hours away in Algona.
Across his childhood, Hilbert spent summertime, spring break, and fall break on family farmland in Kossuth County, haunting the rows—and hoping. But as farming seeped into his blood, Hilbert stood on the periphery and recognized the deep gulf between turnrow and crop, a financial line of demarcation crossed by few.
“Even as a little kid, it was my dream to farm,” Hilbert explains. “Everyone else had athletes or celebrities as their heroes, but my idols were farmers. If I had to work hard and save every penny until I was 50 years old to buy farmland, then that’s what I would have done.”
However, the precocious Hilbert didn’t realize how fast he would attain his life goal. He was about to hitch his wagon to the most popular farming video game on the planet and scoop up 1 million-plus passengers on a wild ride to unprecedented success.
A farming entrepreneur unleashed.
Feed the Monster
A Midwest childhood was textbook for Hilbert: homework, Sunday school, Little League and a dose of Xbox video games at night during free time. The result was a balanced, relatively quiet, and introspective teenager — a far cry from computer nerd or gamer.
Hilbert’s younger brother, Spencer, two years junior, says Hilbert was ordinary, apart from a noteworthy level of dollar-and-cent awareness: “Our parents, especially our mother who worked at a bank, really pushed financial knowledge.”
YouTube debuted in 2005, and almost a decade later, the video-sharing service was roaring, offering the masses an out-of-the-box route to the almighty dollar. Fifteen-year-old Hilbert and a friend took a stab at the big-time, starting The Squad, a channel featuring a variety of video game footage, including Farming Simulator, played exclusively by Hilbert.
Out of the gate, the channel floundered, but its handful of followers tossed Hilbert a bone: They fixated exclusively on Farming Simulator — and none of the other game offerings. Hilbert took the hint and adopted a give’em-what-they-want approach. The Squad became a one-man show, with Hilbert dealing out heaps of digital agriculture content.
In a nutshell, Hilbert filmed himself virtually farming and delivered the footage to the public via his YouTube channel. Farming Simulator is a video game world filled with real-life equipment and crops. Simply, the player farms. The game may sound vanilla at first blush — but plays extremely addicting and exciting to the public, proven by millions of purchases.
Hilbert tapped the online vein. “I knew there was big business opportunity in YouTube. Personally, I’d never been a big YouTube watcher and I didn’t have a huge gameplan. I just knew if you had enough views, then you could make a full-time living. The key was recognizing what people wanted to watch, and Farming Simulator caught the attention of YouTube viewers. It lined up perfectly with my passion for agriculture.”
Sometimes a race is won by those standing closest to the starting gun, and Hilbert was keenly aware of the maxim. Ramping up output and convinced he knew the desires of his audience, the young entrepreneur created his own luck.
He fed the monster.
Bagged and Tagged
As high school graduation arrived in 2016, Hilbert continued to gain an audience, a climb that spurred him to a fury of online activity. “The summer of my graduation, before college, I had a bunch of time on my hands. I had a mentality switch. I knew it was time to discipline myself better and focus on the channel more and more. I posted Farming Simulator clips on YouTube almost every day and the channel began to grow even more. It was no longer a handful of subscribers every week, but it was gaining big chunks and the views were growing.”
The “views” opened the YouTube door to real money. Greenbacks. Simoleons. Lettuce. Hilbert entered college at Iowa State University with 30,000 followers—and mounting. He ignored the shine of the moment and repeatedly asked a bottom-line question: How big?
Swallowing a massive dose of delayed gratification, Hilbert made a conscious choice — a deliberate four-year sprint. “Everything was focused on making YouTube videos and then in spare time looking for other business opportunities and learning though books and podcasts how to allocate capital more effectively. My friends did think it was a bit strange because I tried to stay away from any party life or anything that would waste too much time. It was all about priorities.”
Hilbert aimed for one video per day to make his bones—rain or shine. He cranked out a world of agriculture fantasy, allowing players to modify the digital farm beyond the rows. Dirt tracks, construction, NASCAR vehicles, Chevy trucks, General Lee Dodge Chargers, tow trucks, and repo men became fare for Hilbert’s YouTube videos — and the audience went wild.
Good numbers? Consistently modest and self-effacing, Hilbert plays down his success, but, in truth, he rode the lip of a farming tsunami across YouTube with 1,500 videos. Freshman year; 100,000 subscribers. Sophomore year; 300,000 subscribers. Junior year; 600,000 subscribers.
And at the precise moment Hilbert put the final touches on a degree in agriculture business and economics at Iowa State University — the day of his senior graduation in 2020, his subscriber list rolled over seven figures. One million subscribers bagged and tagged.
Midnight Oil
During the elevator ride beyond 300,000 subscribers during his sophomore year, Hilbert reached a watershed moment — the realization that farmland ownership was in the cards. The income he reeled in, based off views and metrics, opened a genuine avenue toward a land purchase.
“YouTube pays according to who and how many people you bring in, and it all revolves around your CPM (cost per 1,000 impressions),” Hilbert explains. “Basically, they pay you by multiplying views by CPM. My views kept going up and by the time I was a senior, I was swinging a single post for 50,000 to 100,000 views in just 24 hours. Over two to three weeks, if lucky, the same video might go to 500,000 to over 1 million views.”
With a massive audience gained after a four-year grind, Hilbert scoured auction sites, tightened his crosshairs, and bought his first farm in December 2020, buying 120 acres in Mahaska County, followed by additional purchases in Poweshiek County is early 2021 — for a total of 250 acres valued at $1.8 million.
Hilbert and Spencer grow corn and soybeans on the recently acquired ground. Spencer, who graduated from Iowa State University with a degree in economics and finance, is the operation’s mechanical maestro.
“I can’t say enough about Spencer,” Hilbert explains. “He’s an unbelievable help on the farm and anything that needs fixing or repairs, he’s the master.”
The brothers planted their first crop in spring 2021, and Hilbert chronicled the farm journey with a second YouTube channel, eponymously named Grant Hilbert. Within months, the second YouTube channel rolled over 100,000 subscribers.
Once again, Hilbert knew the YouTube faithful clamored for agricultural content. “On my personal YouTube channel, the audience wants to learn about genuine farming reality— all the successes and failures involved in growing crops. I try and show it all. On The Squad channel, the audience wants to be entertained with Farming Simulator content.”
A year prior to the kickoff of Hilbert’s farming operation, he started a software company, SquadBuilt Inc., with sights set on a major agriculture simulation game, American Farming. The game is slated to debut in Q4 2022: “American Farming is a mobile game based out of the Midwest that concentrates exclusively on U.S. agriculture — American farmsteads, American towns, U.S. based brands, cow-calf operations, farrow to finish, and so many more hallmarks of Midwest agriculture,” Hilbert notes. “We’ve got eight employees and five full-time guys, from developers to technical artists. We’ve got a great team and there’s so much opportunity to push the needle in realistic farming games. I can’t wait to see where the company goes.”
Never resting on his laurels, Hilbert stays lean, ingesting a flood of information to stay steps ahead of the pack. He is consumed with self-education, filling every spare block of time with podcasts or audiobooks. “I’m really not that smart so I try to listen and learn from the smartest investors in the world, all to figure out where macro and crypto is going, or where there’s new opportunities in business.”
“If you want to understand Grant, then you have to understand his passion is for farming,” Spencer adds. “He had no way to get into farming as a kid, and the only thing he could do was play a farming video game and get close in his mind. He took that passion and turned it into real life.”
With a farm, two YouTube channels, a software company, and several additional investments, Hilbert burns midnight oil and his mind stays at full-bore — but all entrepreneurial roads lead back to the basics of corn and soybeans.
The Hunger
Notwithstanding gain and accomplishment, Hilbert is remarkably unfettered by ego and airs. “He’s just another guy,” Spencer describes. “Success takes people to bad places in their minds, but Grant is as down-to-earth as they come.”
Hilbert is a pioneer in agriculture. He had the foresight to spot a doorway into farming, and he possessed the bulldog diligence to walk a path no one else had been down in history.
However, he believes the present is ripe: “I want to see others start to farm from scratch. I’m shocked that no teenagers see what I did and try to do something similar. It’s low-hanging fruit, and I’m not someone who is crazy funny or unique. I’m just a guy who stayed consistent.”
“The internet has enabled great forms of leverage,” Hilbert continues. “Businesses can scale so much faster now than in the pre-internet age. We have access to the best and smartest people in the world, and there’s so much opportunity for anyone who has drive.”
“Look at Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and other platforms,” Hilbert concludes. “They’re already filling with journeys on the American farm where people document daily life. The public’s appetite is for all things farming and the hunger is just starting to grow.”
Respect to a young Iowa buck who was never really a gamer — just a farmer with a plan.
To read more stories from Chris Bennett (cbennett@farmjournal.com or 662-592-1106), see:
Cottonmouth Farmer: The Insane Tale of a Buck-Wild Scheme to Corner the Snake Venom Market
Bagging the Tomato King: The Insane Hunt for Agriculture’s Wildest Con Man
Bizarre Mystery of Mummified Coon Dog Solved After 40 Years
The Arrowhead Whisperer: Stunning Indian Artifact Collection Found on Farmland
