Passing Down Tradition, Wisdom, And Work Ethic To Future Generations - Tork Whisler

Tork Whisler [00:00:00] And you could see the kids that like their spirit was crushed. Like the kids that were always happy go lucky. And then one year you see 'em and they're not like that anymore. When you're dreaming about the next thing that's gonna make you happy, your standing on top of the thing that you said was gonna make you happy. Oh, and I meet it just like,

Vance Crowe [00:00:25] Oh, barn talk came outta nowhere

Tork Whisler [00:00:27] For me, right?

Vance Crowe [00:00:28] Yeah. Like all of a sudden I'm like watching, you

Tork Whisler [00:00:30] Know, YouTube

Vance Crowe [00:00:31] Shorts and there's these guys that are having conversations about ag and at first I was like, oh, this isn't all that novel. They're just talking about what you hear guys talk about all the time. And then I was like, no, wait a second. I'm Tim Bickett, a grain and cattle risk management advisor from Worthington, Minnesota. And you are listening to the Vans Crow podcast. Welcome back to the podcast. I'm glad you're here. Today we have Torque Whistler, who is one of the two people on Barn Talk, which is one of YouTube's biggest ag related podcasts and shows. Torque comes on. We talk about his family story, about how they created a fifth, sixth and hopefully seventh Generation Farm. We talk about him growing this program out to be able to interview even some presidential candidates, and we talk about how you can transition on your farm, talking about handing down responsibilities so that your key chain doesn't get too large. This is a fantastic conversation. Tort came all the way down from Washington County, Iowa for this, and I really enjoyed it. We're gonna get to this conversation in just a moment, but I wanted to tell you about a new feature on our website. Longtime listeners of the podcast know that when we're not doing podcasts, we're doing Legacy Interviews. That's where I sit down with loved ones, either individuals or couples to record their life stories so that future generations have a sense of their family history. Well, one of the things that we decided when we put up this website was that I wanted to start trying to put out ideas for how you can have better conversations with your loved ones, whether that's to record a legacy interview or whether it's just to build deeper relationships.

Vance Crowe [00:02:12] So I've started to take a lot of the lessons that I've learned being a communicator, doing Legacy Interviews, and just engaging with people. And we're calling them the communications field guide on our blog, Legacy Interviews dot com slash blog. You can find some of these first early episodes that we're putting out to be able to describe how to start a conversation. What are great first questions, how do you build momentum in a conversation? If you're interested in this, go check 'em out and also let me know what subjects you'd like me to cover. Alright, we're gonna head to the interview with my man, torque Whistler. Torque Whistler, welcome to the podcast. Thanks.

Tork Whisler [00:02:49] Thanks for having me.

Vance Crowe [00:02:50] So you right now run probably the largest ag podcast, certainly on YouTube. When you were growing up, did you dream of being a celebrity?

Tork Whisler [00:03:00] No, and I all, I, I think I was like most farm kids, I just followed my dad around and sat on the fender of a a 40 10 when we were planting corn. And I never, I don't think that I, I don't think I seriously thought about like, what are you gonna do when you grow up? I think I just, I don't know if you wanna call it ignorance or complacency or whatever. I just always had this feeling like, well, I'm probably just gonna do this, you know, I'm just gonna keep doing what, what we've always done. My brothers. So I'm the youngest of three boys and there's a pretty healthy gap. There's five years between me and my middle brother, and then my oldest brother is two years older and he was my oldest brother was the driver, like very smart, good grades and always had the dream of, I'm getting outta here. And then my middle brother was the one as middle brothers, you know, usually are. He was the problem. Him and my dad, they butted heads and you know, he didn't see a place for himself on the farm. So he left. And by the time I was, you know, by the time I was like 16, 17 years old, I just looked around and said, boy, this looks like a pretty good gig. I, I think I can, I think I'll just stay right here. And my dad. So there's a pretty healthy gap there.

Tork Whisler [00:04:32] So there's almost a generation missing between my father and I. So I was late coming along. He was 52 years old when I was born.

Vance Crowe [00:04:41] Oh wow, okay. And there's

Tork Whisler [00:04:42] A 17 year difference between him and my mother. So my dad grew up on the farm that we live now, and he kind of like my older brother, he didn't think there was a place there for him. He went to the University of Colorado and then the war came along World War ii and he got drafted and he ended up becoming a pilot and he did 55 missions over Europe. He was a P 51 pilot. So that's a pretty neat, if you're gonna, if you're gonna have to fly in a war like that, P 51 is pretty good. Ride. Got out of that and then came home, didn't know what he wanted to do and the GI Bill was going on, so he decided he was gonna go to law school. So he went to law school, Colorado, passed the bar, got a job with a law firm in Denver. And by that time he realized he hated lawyers and he never wanted to be one because the amount of time that he had spent reading the law and writing the law and surveying the law, he knew that wasn't for him. So in 49 he came home and started farming with his brother. And so that's why he was so late finding a, finding a suitor. And he and my mom were married. And then I came along a little later, but being a military man, being an older man, very regimented, I can call either one of my brothers to this day and there are certain, I'll call 'em trigger phrases that I can quote.

Tork Whisler [00:06:17] And as soon as I say the first two words, they can finish it. You know, like, we're gonna do this. There's three ways of doing this the right way, the wrong way, and my way, we're gonna do it my way. The best job you can possibly do is not too good for me. What are you crying about? Stick that lip out a little further. Why don't you if you're gonna do that? I mean that kind of stuff. He was not a, he wasn't a comforting person. He was very, everything was very black and white. He was fiercely loyal to all of us as far as if anybody was gonna reprimand you, it was gonna be him. It wasn't gonna be somebody else. But there was a lot of, there was a lot of back and forth. And I think that's part of the reason why my brothers, it took them a long time to have the relationship that I had with him earlier in life. Although in my teenage years, we were like, oil and water, we fought all the time. I think the difference was that my brothers, they, they just took it. And growing up I saw how that worked and didn't work very well. So I just threw it back at him. And we, I don't think we ever came fisticuffs, but there were a lot of heated moments. But anyway, so

Vance Crowe [00:07:43] Was he a successful farmer?

Tork Whisler [00:07:47] Yes, I'd say he was very progressive in the fact that when he came home and started farming, he started farrowing pigs very early when a lot of people had, everybody had a few pigs, but he started growing the size of his herd early. And

Vance Crowe [00:08:06] And farrowing is when you impregnate the, the mamas and then they have babies and you're producing babies as a whole part of it, as opposed to send me the the babies once they're born.

Tork Whisler [00:08:16] Correct. Yeah. So back then all the production was closed loop pharaoh to finish. There wasn't any guys at that time. There were no guys that were buying feeder pigs, even let alone wiener pigs. Wiener pigs weren't a thing because the diet hadn't been invented that you could wean a pig that young. So pretty much any farmers that were raising pigs, they had the sows, they farrowed 'em, they kept 'em, they finished them. And a lot of people were finishing 'em outside, finishing 'em in the field. And you only farrowed twice a year. You know, you farrowed as early in the spring as you thought you could get by with and still keep your barn or your shed warm enough that the pigs wouldn't freeze, obviously. And then you tried to fer 'em once more before fall and get the pigs grown and sold before winter came. But we built our first confinement buildings in, he built the first finisher in 71 the year I was born. And so we still farrowed in a barn and we kept the sows in barn lots outside. But then we brought the pigs inside to finish instead of putting 'em out on grass. And then that grew. And by the time I was in high school, we had about 250 sows, fair to finish, which was a good sized operation. So I would say yes, he was successful. But the other thing that I think weighed really heavy on him was he had, he had been all over the world and he saw, you know, he saw a lot of people die, a lot of his friends die and he saw war.

Tork Whisler [00:09:57] And when he, I mean that changes people and to what degree it changed him. I don't know. 'cause I didn't know him before all that, but he had a saying. So our farm's called, this'll do farm and our YouTube channel Ctle do. And the namesake of that, or the start of that was when, when he bought out his brother and his sister, he, he inherited a one third interest in 160 acres and the home farm. And then he had to buy his brother and his sister out. But when he, when that was all done and they purchased it and they went to have it recorded, the lawyer or somebody at the, at the county asked them, what's your farm name? And they hadn't given it any thought. And my dad just looked at my mom and he said, well, I guess we'll just call it this'll do. And it stuck. And when I was a kid, we used to have a sign that they dreamed up that was out by the road and it said, LS and three Ts, Lawrence, Shirley, Todd, Trent, torque, this'll do farm cultivated to yield contentment. So it was kind of a double, 'cause we obviously cultivate for yield, but his idea was right or wrong, we were gonna be content right there.

Vance Crowe [00:11:14] That's a pretty deep

Tork Whisler [00:11:15] Thought

Vance Crowe [00:11:16] For a,

Tork Whisler [00:11:17] So when he came home, when he came home and started farming, he told my grandparents that he wasn't, no matter what happened, he wasn't changing again because he had gone to college with the idea that he was gonna be like a, a geologist. He went out there for like geology and then he didn't like that. And then the war came along and he flew and then he thought he'd be a lawyer. So when he came home and started farming, he, he said, right or wrong, I'm not switching. And so I think he was progressive, but then at some point he made the conscious decision that we're not gonna grow this thing for the sake of growing because I just want to be content. And he enjoyed, like he enjoyed working. We, he had a hired man, not so much once all of us kids got to an age,

Vance Crowe [00:12:20] 'cause

Tork Whisler [00:12:20] We had all this labor. But I always got the feeling from him that he had all he wanted and he didn't want anymore. And he wasn't interested in getting bigger. He wasn't interested when the land, when the land, you know, boom came in the late seventies. There were a few farms that I'm sure that he thought about bid on. And we ultimately did buy a farm that was in our family off an uncle. But that was later. That was, that was later. And I think that he made the conscious decision that he was just gonna be satisfied.

Vance Crowe [00:12:59] I mean that's true wealth, right, that Petit talked about how, you know, the wealthy man is not the one that has the ability to go out and get whatever he wants. It's the one that's happy with what he has. Yeah.

Tork Whisler [00:13:09] Because

Vance Crowe [00:13:09] Then you don't, you don't striving, when you think about your dad and the way he raised you, did you, when you were raising your kids, try and be like your dad or not like your dad?

Tork Whisler [00:13:22] So I think a, a little bit, obviously not, not everything. So the example of I, I obviously, I think I set the example that I worked hard, but that was because I felt like I had to, because from the time our children were born until the last, until Sawyer decided that he was gonna farm with me, I went from farrowing our own pigs, raising our own pigs and farming to not having any idea what I was gonna do. Because the, the hog, the hog business changed so much in the nineties and we ended up getting out of the farrowing business completely just

Vance Crowe [00:14:08] A total collapse. Total collapse. Like I, I grew up in central Illinois and people were coming in and like their entire family wealth just completely gone. 'cause you were selling pigs for far less than what it cost to raise 'em.

Tork Whisler [00:14:19] Yeah. And we really, we lucked out in the fact that, you know, we didn't, we didn't ride the ship all the way to the bottom. We knew what was coming and we knew that we had to change. And Washington County, where we live was one of the early places that people started to make that change to contract finishing. And we did that. We made the decision that we were gonna sell all the sows and we were kind, convert everything that wasn't finishing to finishing. And so we started custom feeding. But when you go from doing all that to custom feeding, you don't need near the labor that you did. And my dad wasn't gonna go get a job. I mean, he was older, obviously. He was, he was in his sixties then. And so it was up to me. I mean there basically, there wasn't a place for me is what it came down to. I mean, they, they definitely didn't push me out. But, you know, I wasn't very bright, but I was bright enough to know that for me to stay on the farm was gonna be a, a burden to make it all work. And so I had to figure out what I was gonna do. And I ended up going to work in the construction business building these buildings. And then I ultimately met a guy

Vance Crowe [00:15:37] With the hog buildings. You

Tork Whisler [00:15:38] Mean hog buildings?

Vance Crowe [00:15:39] Yeah. Okay.

Tork Whisler [00:15:40] Yeah. So I, I worked for a small company that built a few buildings a year and they were actually the people that converted our barns. So I got a, I had a pretty good relationship with the guy that ran that group and they were a smaller company in the fact that they did everything. His crew, you know, they framed, they wired, they put the equipment in, which I didn't know at the time, but was a great asset because when I transitioned to the people that I ultimately ended up spending 15 years working for her, I had a, I had like free schooling on how everything went together when so many people that were in that industry only did one thing. And that helped me a lot. Anyway, all that to say, you know, I saw, I saw everything that I did as, okay, the water heater broke, so we gotta make this much money. So if I was making $14 an hour, I was looking for a way to work overtime. And when I transitioned to selling, then every building I sold, I had the, I had the, I had the commission figured when I went to sell it and I was like, okay, well this'll get us this far. And when I looked at having to put a child through college, I was like, okay, well that's this many 24 hundreds a year. Hope I can do that. So I worked, I worked a lot and there was a time in there I'm kind of getting, I'm, I'll get to your, that's

Vance Crowe [00:17:19] Okay, this is fine

Tork Whisler [00:17:20] To your answer. But when the whole hog business collapsed, I was married in 93 in 1993. By 1998 I was out of the hog business. So that period of time, and my oldest son was born in 95, my second son was born in 2000. The, the darkest days of our married life and my life personally were the first years of my marriage.

Vance Crowe [00:17:52] Ooh, those are tough years if everything's going well.

Tork Whisler [00:17:55] Yeah. And I think something that we like to bag a lot about generations today, but one thing that generations today have that we didn't have, I feel like is a lot more knowledge and a lot more places to get advice on parenting and communication and like how help if you need it. I guess I say if you're willing to our par both of our parents were of the, of the mind that like, you didn't talk about a lot of, like you didn't talk about religion, you didn't talk about money. And we had to figure it all out. Like our kids, when they talk to us about starting a family, you know, and they're so worried about they don't wanna start a family until they have money and they have this and they have that. And we're like, we didn't know anything like we thought we did. But very soon after we realized, oh yeah, we have no idea what this is supposed to look like.

Vance Crowe [00:18:56] The number of people that have told me that, like, so they watch these Legacy Interviews that we do and then they write me the, the adult children would be like, I became an adult the day I watched my parents interview and the way they're 40 years old and they're saying the reason I became an adult is 'cause I thought my parents had everything figured out and now I'm realizing nobody has anything figured out and all we're doing is the best we can. Yep. And now I realize like, oh, I'm not gonna become an adult some other day. Like you just are. Yep.

Tork Whisler [00:19:24] That a hundred percent. So, you know, we went through a really hard time through that and thank the good lord that I married up and Tricia, she wanted a fixer upper. So I was

Vance Crowe [00:19:37] A perfect fixer upper

Tork Whisler [00:19:38] 'cause I needed a lot of work and I still do. But I was, I was definitely the, our children were disciplined. In other words, they knew that dad was the, was the backstop mom was the, was the caregiver. So Tricia was the caregiver and Tricia told you, you know, you should do this or whatever. And if you didn't do it then dad was gonna get involved. I was the heavy and it was easy for me to be the heavy because I wasn't there a lot. Right. I was working a lot. But that side of it, I probably regret a little bit in that I probably was, I probably was the heavy. But the other part of it that we definitely made a priority was traditions. So every Friday night we got pizza or we made pizza and we, we slept, we all slept in the living room, the kids asleep on the floor, asleep on the couch with us. We watched a movie and then when we got older, they slept on our floor. 'cause I wasn't gonna, I got you get to a point where you're like, I'm not sleeping on this couch anymore. But, so we did that and we had, like, on Sundays we went to church pretty consistently. Not all the time, but Sunday was just us. And we, we tried to keep that just us. And I think that, I think traditions get a bad rap.

Tork Whisler [00:21:12] I think every generation goes through a time where you think that everything that you were brought up with, you want to question. And then I think you go through a period of time where you kind of have an aha moment and you go, oh, that wasn't such a bad idea. And I think we did enough of those kind of things that our kids felt like they had a, they kind of had a safe place to fall and they had consistency there no matter what happened outside of that. And the only other thing I'll say, because we did a lot of things wrong, there's no doubt about that. We did a lot of things wrong. The other thing I think we both did as parents is whenever my children had a hair-brained idea and they still have 'em, and today they're a lot more expensive hair-brained ideas. But we never told them, oh, there's no, that'll never work. When they wanted to go, you know, try this sport or try that sport or do this or do that, or you know, build a fort in the timber or they were going to, you name it, we told them, all right, go ahead. And then we didn't always like help 'em out a lot. We just talked 'em up like, well if you want it, go ahead and do it. And then a lot of times they would come to their own conclusion that, oh, this is, this isn't gonna work.

Tork Whisler [00:22:44] But we tried really hard not to limit their imagination because I feel like Trisha, my wife would always say when we would, when we would go, when she would go pick up the boys from school, she said that age in there when they get to be sixth grade, seventh grade, fifth, sixth, seventh grade, and she would watch all the kids come outta school. You could see you had watched all these kids grow up and you could see the kids that like their spirit was crushed. Hmm.

Vance Crowe [00:23:19] Like the kids

Tork Whisler [00:23:19] That were always happy go lucky. And then one year you see 'em and they're not like that anymore and you just wonder what, what happened? And it might be nothing, it might just be how they changed. But she always said to me that no matter what, she did not wanna be the one that crushed her kid's spirit. And you know, I don't know whether good or

Vance Crowe [00:23:41] Right

Tork Whisler [00:23:42] Or wrong, that's what we tried to do.

Vance Crowe [00:23:44] I mean it's, it's one of those things that when you're young, you were talking about traditions, like the traditions that are all around you. You're like, ah, this is just what we do. But what I found with our kids and teaching them the traditions that we have and we just make 'em up but then we do 'em over and over again, is that it gives the kids like some feeling of control. Yeah.

Tork Whisler [00:24:03] Right.

Vance Crowe [00:24:04] Like my daughter knows this is how we start dinner. We sing a song every time and this is just what we do. You know, we do these, I in fact, just last night I made a new tradition, which was, it's the spring pine cone burning. Right. Kids love fire. I don't really want 'em throwing logs in there, but I can get 'em to collect all the pine cones

Tork Whisler [00:24:22] Yep. And

Vance Crowe [00:24:23] Throw pine cones in the fire. We had a big event of it. But now they know, oh, I only get to throw things in during the pine cone burning. And it's this beautiful way to work with your kids so that that way they're, they feel like agency over their lives when you're, when you're doing traditions and

Tork Whisler [00:24:40] It's amazing what an Im like what, how that affects 'em. And some of those, some of those traditions they'll carry on. And I'll give you a funny one. I don't know why this is, but so we still go to the, to the church in our little town that I grew up in and we've church hopped a little bit, but the older we get, the more we like the tradition, we go back. So my dad and his brother, they both went to the UP church in Washington and they farmed together. And at some point before I was born, they had a falling out and they like serious falling out and they didn't speak like, they didn't speak for the, basically the rest of their lives other than if they happened to be somewhere they would say hello, but they never talked. And that, that's a regret that I have for them, that they never were able to get past that. However, his brother and his family sat on the north side of the, of the church and we sat on the south side. And to this day when we go in there, we always go in the south door. We sit on the south side and like I have friends, I have people I know that go there, you know, and if it ever comes up like they didn't see us at church or I didn't see them at church, I'll say, well you sit on the north side, I don't really pay attention to anything that goes on the north side. And it's not a very big church and there's no reason that I wouldn't sit on the north side, but it literally is ingrained in me. Oh yeah. Lawrence Whistler and his family, they always sit on the south side of the south side.

Tork Whisler [00:26:11] So, well

Vance Crowe [00:26:11] That's, church is one of those things, like my dad instituted the, the fear of God into everybody. We sat in our same pew. Now when we go back for, you know, Easter or Christmas with my parents, I'm appalled that somebody's sitting in our pew. Right. You're like, well it has been about 30 years since you've, since you've sat in here, but like, maybe not 30, but, but like it's funny how ingrained you get into the, the little things that are Yep. So you've been raising your boys enough that one of them started a YouTube channel for you and, and took you off in this wild direction of barn talk.

Tork Whisler [00:26:46] Yeah, so just about, just about 2000. So Sawyer graduated, Sawyer's the youngest, he graduated in 2000. And he, from a, from a young kid, he was your typical, you know, sports kid, loved sports, but loved football, football was his thing. He had a football in his hand all the time. And as soon as he was old enough to kind of grasp the positions and started playing peewee league football and then, you know, going up, we would watch the, we would watch the combine, you know, where the players all, and when he was in school, he would tape it so he had the whole thing or you know, DVR it. And I would come home and he'd be like, this is probably when he was in fifth, sixth grade, something like that. And he'd be like, dad, dad, come here. Look at this, look at this, look at this. And we'd be watching all the running backs, running backs, running backs, running backs. Another running backs look like Sawyer, you know? And all of a sudden there'd be this kid, this short kid from BYU in the combine, you know, and Soer be like, see that guy? That's me right there. That's me right there. I'm gonna be, you know, I'm gonna be a ready back. And that's what he wanted to do. And all through high school, I mean he ran track, but football was his passion.

Tork Whisler [00:28:21] And he looked at his dad, who I say that our podcast is, you know, kind of like it's the train wreck of podcasts or the auto accident podcast that people wanna look away, but they can, and part of that's because they look at me compared to Sawyer and they're like, is his dad like a, is he a giant dwarf or what? You know, what is that? They're trying to get some kind of, some kind of references to how short I really am. But he thought that he was gonna be short like me. And then when he was probably a sophomore, he just started growing.

Vance Crowe [00:28:54] Yeah, he's a big dude

Tork Whisler [00:28:56] And he just didn't stop. He just got so quickly he went from wanting to be a running back to being a wide receiver. That was his thing. And he was, you know, he was fast and all that, but he was also really, really tight and had, he had to be super careful about stretching out 'cause he, he played, he played injured all the time and through high school, his thought process was, I'm gonna go somewhere that I can play football. And that was all he cared about. And by the time his senior year came around and football was done, and then track season came in, he was planning on going to a couple of two year schools and then transfer. He thought he would transfer. And he came down one morning and we were supposed to go visit a college out in Western Iowa. And he just says to me, he goes, I don't want to go. And I said, I said, okay. I said, why? He goes, I haven't lifted weights in two weeks and today's the first day that I can remember that I woke up that I don't hurt. Oh. And he said, I don't think I want to go do that for, he goes, I don't think I want to go hurt for the next four years just to say I went to college and played football. I was like, oh. I said, okay, well what are you gonna do? Well during this time I, you know, I said I was selling hog buildings. So the company I worked with, we were a big general contractor and we sold hog buildings all over the Midwest.

Tork Whisler [00:30:32] And I was my own best customer. So I wasn't actively involved in the farm. I, I helped whenever I could, but I started building my own hog sheds on the farm. And the company that we custom fed for, they supplied the labor. So it was basically what you call a triple net lease. So I wasn't the one that was taking care of the pigs, but I had it there. We used the manure on our ground, which was a great deal, great fertilizer. And it really worked. Plus I was making pretty good money. So it was a great tax shelter. You know, I was playing the depreciation game and when Sawyer got to be summer before his senior year, he always liked, he liked the farming and he was looking for something to make money. And I said, why don't you just chore, chore the buildings? Because the kid that was touring them for the, for our integrator, he was driving like 25 minutes every day to come do it. And so I talked to, I talked to the people that do the contracts for him. I said, Hey, I said, would you be interested in just having Sawyer do it? And they're like, yeah, that'd be great. So he started touring my hog buildings. And so when I asked that, now

Vance Crowe [00:31:48] What does it mean to chore hog buildings? So

Tork Whisler [00:31:52] Pretty much the, the model today of whether it be what they call a feeder pig barn or a wean to finish, so a wean to finish barn, they bring the pigs to you, to the producer that has built the building. So you've built all the infrastructure, you've built the building, you've got the driveway, you've got the water, you've got the power, everything's ready to go to raise these pigs. And the integrator brings you pigs that are, say they're 15 to 20 pounds and you care for 'em every day. So you make sure that the feed works, the water works, the temperature's right, the air's, right. If there's a pig that's sick, you, you give it a shot or you pull, if it's a pig that you know just needs a little extra care, you're pulling those pigs and putting 'em in what we call like a hospital pen, getting 'em started and then checking 'em every day, twice a day, all the way until their market age. And then you're loading those pigs out when they're big enough to go, you're loading the trucks with them that go to the harvest facility and all that. So you're the, you're the daily caregiver. And then when that group go is gone and it's up to you to get the building washed, sanitized, everything ready to go, and then you start over again. And so there's a lot of, at that time there were a lot of young people that that's how they were coming back to the family farm. Like there were a lot of guys that built hog buildings in the two thousands where they were grain farming and there wasn't enough there that you could bring a son or daughter back.

Tork Whisler [00:33:26] But if you built a couple of hog buildings on it, the building would pay its way in seven years and then 10 years. And you could have your child chore it and you could pay them $30,000 a year to chore it. And then you would have them for all that extra labor that they could help you grain farm. And at the end of that period, the building's paid for. So then that extra payment gives them something to live on, to start a family. And it, it was a, the hog building was, it really was the vehicle that brought a whole generation back to the farm in areas like southeast Iowa where hog production was big. Today it's really not possible because when I started, those buildings were a seven year payout and then they were a 10 year payout, then they were a 12 year payout. And now then, I don't know if you could make, if you're taking anything out for your labor, I don't know if you can make 'em pay on a 20 year payout.

Vance Crowe [00:34:35] And what's the most expensive part? The labor to build them or the materials or all of the above?

Tork Whisler [00:34:40] All the above. So when we started, when we started just for rough numbers. So you know, a 2,400 head building, a building that would be say 50 y by 400 feet long and you'd put 2,400 head of pigs in there and you'd turn that twice a year, you could build that for less than $400,000. When I built my first barn, my first barn was built in 2010, that building was $475,000. Sawyer built, I'm giving away the story, but Sawyer built his barn in 2020 and it cost him $750,000. Oh

Vance Crowe [00:35:25] Man. And

Tork Whisler [00:35:26] We get paid the same, both con, all the contracts the same. So we have four buildings. So I have three and he has one contract's the same on all of them. And that building that he built, that was just before COVID and building prices and interest rates. So the other thing is we built that period of time there from the late nineties through the two thousands. The interest rate money was so cheap. I mean, is that whatever industry you're in? We were, we had those buildings financed for 3%, 2.5%. I mean, money was so easy to get and the return was good. The cost wasn't too high. And so you could pay him off pretty quick and then you had that income. But so from the time he built that in 2020 today that building's over a million dollars and your interest, he got that building, I think his, I think his interest rate on that was four and a 5%. You couldn't do it for 8%.

Vance Crowe [00:36:23] So Sawyer starts touring barns. Yeah. Does he go on to college?

Tork Whisler [00:36:26] Yeah. So no. So I said, I said, you know, what are you gonna do? And he said, well I'm gonna keep touring your barns and I'm gonna figure out what I wanna do. And you know the, as a parent you have a choice there. So his brother Clay is my oldest. So Clay is, clay is five years older. And he was the perfect starter kid for two parents that didn't know what the hell they were doing. So Clay was the kid that you loved going to parent teacher conferences. 'cause the, the teachers would just gush about this kid. He's like, oh, he's such a good kid. You know, he does all his stuff. Right. And he was smart. He got that from his mother and he like, I don't know why, but he just was squared away, always. Like he always was squared away and knew what he wanted to do. And when it came time for college, we were like, are we gonna go visit some college? He's like, yep, we're gonna go here, here and here. And I got these scheduled, can you make this work? You know, I've already called the admissions office and set this up. And then he decided that he wanted to go to the University of Northern Iowa because he was really into music, very good at music and he was gonna get a music degree, which I was like instantly going. The capitalist in me was going, see how's that gonna make any money? But I didn't say that. 'cause they gotta figure out their own way. And he came down and is like, here's the fafsa, I've got it all figured out as close as I can going off of last year's tax returns,

Vance Crowe [00:38:01] You know? Wow.

Tork Whisler [00:38:03] So he was, he was the cruise control child. Sawyer was not, Sawyer got a little more genetics from his dad. He really enjoyed talking. He really enjoyed having a lot of fun. He didn't listen all that well and he didn't always learn the first time from his mistakes. So

Vance Crowe [00:38:25] He

Tork Whisler [00:38:25] Was more of a challenge. But, so when he tells you that he doesn't wanna go to college, on the one hand you're like, it's kind of beat into a generation that your kids gotta go to college. Like, you know, they need to go to college. But then I knew enough people in my work at that time that were working on crews and working in an office doing something that they didn't have a degree for that had $40,000 in or more of student debt. And they had an ag studies degree from a state university. And I was like, I told Soer, I'm like, well if you think you're just gonna go and just skate and learn how to drink beer more efficiently, more efficiently through a garden hose, you can do that anywhere. And he said, I think I just wanna, I just wanna farm and I wanna chore the buildings,

Vance Crowe [00:39:20] Man. In 2000 this would be, now there's a, there's a world where people aren't going to college, but that one yeah,

Tork Whisler [00:39:26] In

Vance Crowe [00:39:27] 2000 there is so much pressure. Take on that debt, go to school, you can't be wealthy without a college degree.

Tork Whisler [00:39:33] And he felt that because outta his group, pretty much all of his friends went, went to college. And you know, I think it was a lot harder for him than what he admits when we look back on it. But I was like, okay, that's fine. And I guess to, to get out a little further, we literally, we grain farm 400 acres. We have a 400 acre family farm and we raised 20,000 head of, of contract feeder pigs or contract pigs a year. We're definitely not a big operation. I, I had done, I've done a lot of dumb things in life, but I've done a few things, right? And when I was selling buildings, I was, you know, I was good at it. I quit doing that 2015. And the reason I quit is basically some people would say it's not a good reason, but I felt like I was gonna lose my soul if I didn't quit because sales to me was like heroin. Like I really liked it, I was good at it and it was very addictive. Like it was very addictive to me. The guy that I worked for, I pretty much got a, a business degree for free, just working for him.

Tork Whisler [00:41:04] He, when I started that I had a really bitter view of agriculture because of the, of the experience I had getting out of the hog business because you grow up with the idea that it's always gonna be this way and then the world laughs at you and it isn't. And I wanted nothing to do with the hog business as far as owning my own sheds or anything like that. I just wanted to work for somebody, get a paycheck, go home. And in the time that I worked for him, I went to work for them in 2000 and he, like, he showed me it, it changed my mindset of money because money to him was like a wrench to a mechanic. Like everything he did was just leverage. Like it was just leverage. And he did a lot of things outside of the hog building business. He was invested in a lot of different stuff.

Vance Crowe [00:42:02] And for the type of people that view money as leverage risk is a totally different thing. Completely.

Tork Whisler [00:42:08] And

Vance Crowe [00:42:08] So like they're looking at the world through a different set of eyes than Yeah. Than Normies, right? Yeah. Like Norm, I, I'm, I'm a normie, right? Like the, the idea of taking on that debt and that risk, it like would make my heart pound and stand up on edge. But the people that do it, you know, they don't just get done with one deal and say, ah, we made it good payoff. They take that money and they just cycle it right back in and they just keep going bigger and bigger and bigger.

Tork Whisler [00:42:33] Yeah. And that's, and that's a hundred percent where I was, I was risk adverse and like that risk that we assumed in the hog business nearly cost me my marriage. So, you know, my wife, she, she was a, she grew up in town, she didn't know farming. She had no idea the size of checks that you write. And so when we got married, it was all, she was like, what, you know, what is this feed bill? You know, whatever. And

Vance Crowe [00:43:05] Did she get into accounting on the business? Was she,

Tork Whisler [00:43:07] No, she didn't.

Vance Crowe [00:43:08] Okay.

Tork Whisler [00:43:09] And that I would, I will tell you that my advice to anybody that any couple that get married, that that one or the other is like self-employed, that that spouse has got to be, has got to be involved at some level in the money side of it.

Vance Crowe [00:43:27] Amen.

Tork Whisler [00:43:27] Because if they're not, if, if you don't have perspective as to what that money's being used for and how the, the leverage part of it, they'll, it'll freak 'em out. Like it'll freak 'em out. I

Vance Crowe [00:43:40] Mean, I've heard so many people where the wife was the bookkeeper and so she actually understood what was going on. And then you found ones where dad dies and mom becomes the bookkeeper and now all of a sudden she realizes we've been on a shoestring. Yeah,

Tork Whisler [00:43:54] We

Vance Crowe [00:43:55] Did Christmas last year and we way overspent what we had. Right? And so if you don't, if if the wife is not clued in or the other spouse is not clued in, you can be in for some shocks that'll shock you all the way to the core and, and change your memory of what was really going on

Tork Whisler [00:44:12] A hundred percent.

Vance Crowe [00:44:13] While that, while all the pressure was on,

Tork Whisler [00:44:15] A hundred percent, so I was risk adverse and all, you know, time after time he would say to me, he's like, why don't you build some barns? Like why don't you, why don't you basically get back on the horse? And I was like, I don't want that. I was like, my parents are old, they don't need the responsibility. I said, I don't wanna tie up the land and all that. And he, he was never pushy. He just, he always kept planting that seed. And then I watched, you know, I was selling, I was selling these guys. The, the thing that I enjoyed the most about that period of time and what I was doing was the people that were doing exactly what we talked about, guys that had kids that wanted them involved in the farming business and didn't have a vehicle to get 'em there. And that contract finishing, that was the vehicle that was gonna get the kids back on the farm. And I love that. And then the more I did it, the more it just became obvious to me that in our situation, if I ever wanted there to be another generation to be a, not even, you know, not a slam dunk, but to have the opportunity to possibly be able to farm, the only way that was gonna happen was if we had some vehicle to get us more income and a way for, to pay some labor. And so ultimately I started building my own sheds, but the last shed that I built for myself was in, was actually in 2018.

Tork Whisler [00:45:49] And I, I left in 2015 because I was gone all the time. And when I was home, I was on my phone and I had the blessing of having what might still be, I don't know whether it is or not, but at the time it was the best year that anybody in that business had ever had selling. And you know, you sell finishers, a 2,400 head finisher was half a million dollars or $600,000. But then if you build a sow unit where the, where the, the moms farrowed, that was a whole different deal. And, and you know, we were quoting sow units that were $15 million and that was when that really started to take off where we were. And I had the privilege of selling the people that we actually feed pigs for today. I sold them a couple of sow units. And that really changed your perspective, you know, when you're working on that commission and all that. And that was great. But it was also, you start, you feel really good and then you get to about October and then you have those thoughts of, okay, how am I gonna do more next year? Like, where am I gonna find enough people that wanna build these? And it was just, it was always right there. And you know,

Vance Crowe [00:47:19] It's a surprising thing, right? Because if you were looking at it a year ahead of time being like, I just sold that much, I'll be happy then, right? Like, things will be satisfied. I'll be able to figure that out. And if I did that as a plateau forever, yeah, that'd be good. But once you get there, it's like seeing a stock price. Yep. Go to a certain point, you're like, oh man, when it hits that price, I'm gonna finally feel good. And then you do it and you're like, Hey, keep doing something I want. I like it a lot more. When you're going up into the right, you

Tork Whisler [00:47:45] Have, so I had, I, like, I had an epiphany, I had finished up, I was actually coming home from Missouri and I was finishing up really, really good year. And somebody called me from the office, I think it was the guy that, that owns the business now. The man that started it, sold it. And this guy, he had worked there, but he ended up buying it from him. And he said to me just what I was thinking, he said, Hey, sometimes stop in here. I wanna talk to you about next year. What do you think, what do you think the prospects are for next year? And I was reading, I had been reading a book and I honestly cannot remember what the name of it was, but there was a passage in there and this guy said, just remember that when you're, when you're dreaming about the next thing that's gonna make you happy, you are standing on top of the thing that you said was gonna make you happy.

Vance Crowe [00:48:44] Oh,

Tork Whisler [00:48:45] And immediate, it just like,

Vance Crowe [00:48:47] Boom.

Tork Whisler [00:48:48] And I went home that, I went home that night and it was probably like on a weekend and I told my wife that weekend, I said, I'm gonna quit. And she, she, because she knew, you know, I like to talk, I like to rub my mouth. And so sales was it, it was, it was right up my alley. It was what I was passionate about. But that side of it, as far as not being satisfied, it just eats at you and eats at you and eats at you. And I just knew that if I didn't, like, if I didn't just get out of that, the person I was gonna become, and to some extent the person I was, because I wasn't the, i, I didn't enjoy, like, I didn't enjoy just the little things because I was so fixated on what was next. So in 2015 I made the decision to quit. And I was just very, very lucky in the fact that I had no idea what I was gonna do.

Vance Crowe [00:49:48] Had you made enough that you could retire? No. Did you need to work? No.

Tork Whisler [00:49:50] Well, I, I take that back. So in hindsight, I think I could have just retired, I think the farm and the hog buildings because I, I had most of them paid for by that point. I think I could have. But in your mind you're going from dependent on somebody else to dependent on yourself. And everybody's like, what do you do for health insurance? You know, what do you do? Oh, no benefits. And I had it my mind, I'm like, well I gotta do something until these kids are done with college. And Sawyer was still in high school at that point. So one of the last phone calls, actually I've made this call before I quit. So I called a friend of mine and a guy, he was kind of a mentor of mine too. He actually, he actually owns one of the largest family hog operations in the US and he was one of my customers and we were trying to build another SA unit for him. Like we, he was trying to get it permitted and we had bid it and it was basically gonna be a clone to one that we had already, that I had already sold him. And I just called him up and I said, Hey. I said, so you think, you think next year? So thinking about 16, I said, you think you think you're gonna get that s unit going? And he said, he goes, I don't think so. He goes, I think it's gonna take, I think it's gonna take a, a change in the leadership at the, basically the governor's race in where this was being built.

Tork Whisler [00:51:29] He goes, I don't think it's gonna happen this year. And I said, all right. I said, good enough, that's what I wanna know. And he said, he said, why? What's up? And I said, well, I think I'm gonna quit my job. And he goes, what? I said, yeah. I said, I've had enough. I said, I wanna be home more. I said, I don't wanna live at the Holiday Inn down Columbia. And I said, I, it is just time. And he goes, well what are you gonna do? I said, I don't have any idea. I said, you got anything to do? And he said, well, when you get it all figured out, no, when you're gonna be done, he goes, call me. 'cause he goes, hi, his exact words. He goes, you're pretty good dealing with shit going wrong and there's something going wrong down here all the time. I said, okay, good enough. So I ended up going to work for the integrator that we feed for today. And what I did for 'em was I did their contracts and their building specs. So when they had somebody that came to 'em that wanted to build a building, they're like, what do I build? And so I, I wrote the contract and I did the building specs, which was right up my alley. And then I did what they call grower relations, which I just kind of backstop all the field staff where if they had somebody that they were dealing with that they had a problem. It's always good to not have the person that's dealing with that individual every day be the heavy to, you know, remove yourself to that. And, you know, I've had my butt chewed enough that I was pretty good at dealing with people. I don't lose my temper very often. And so that's what I did.

Tork Whisler [00:53:00] And I did that for five years and then Sawyer graduates and decides he's not gonna go to college. And I said to him, I said, well, if you're not gonna go, I said, you need to build a hog building if you're gonna stay on the farm. Because I said, if you just are doing this working for me, at some point you are gonna get sick of it or we're gonna piss each other off and you're gonna leave. But I said, if you build that hog building, you're stuck. And I said, in the long run, I said, you're, you know, you're 18 years old. I said, that thing's gonna get paid for and then you're gonna have something. And I said, that's what you need to do. So he built that hog building and then a whole bunch of things happened within that business, but I didn't quit. They, they sat me down and said that they were gonna go a different direction. They said I could keep coming as much as I wanted, but they were only gonna pay me till Friday. So I, anyway, that was the first time I'd ever been fired. But they,

Vance Crowe [00:54:05] How'd that feel

Tork Whisler [00:54:08] At the time? It was, at the time it was like a, like a slap in the face because, you know, I was one of those people brought up from my dad that, you know, work hard and I thought that I did everything that I needed to do. And in hindsight, it really wasn't, it really wasn't what I did as much as it was the, the ownership in the business and the structure, they were changing and they needed somebody that was gonna do a lot more, what I wanna say a lot more, I won't say book work, but a lot more organization stuff. And you don't have to be around me very long to know that. Like, if I can go talk to somebody and tell 'em what they need to do, great. But if you expect me to make a spreadsheet about it, that's not my,

Vance Crowe [00:54:58] So

Tork Whisler [00:55:01] I, I was upset about it, but at the same time I was relieved because at the end of the day, I don't know if I ever would've quit.

Vance Crowe [00:55:10] Mm.

Tork Whisler [00:55:10] Like I feel like that security. 'cause honestly, the only reason I was really there was that security of having benefits. And I had, I'd had a company truck for 15 years and I had a company truck and you know, it was just, it was tradition. It was, it was similar to what I did except I didn't have to drive all over and all that. And it was comfortable. But in hindsight, it was the best thing that could have happened for everything that we were doing. And, and I was fine. It was, it's, you know, it's not like we weren't stressed about money because we were doing okay. It was just my identity had been in that whole world and then it wasn't, you know, it wasn't, and so all those people, you know, I have a phone that has, you know, 1200 names in it, 1200 people in it, whatever, it's in it. And they're all from that industry. They're all from that world. And then when you just step out of that, even though I was still, you know, custom feeding, but I didn't have any reason to talk to any of those people and you're kind of like, well who the hell am I? You know, what, what do I, is this all there is? Which shortly after that, so this was in the summer after Sawyer had built his building and I said, I'm gonna be here too. And so we started doing everything together, touring together, and he picked up a GoPro and his first thought was that he was gonna make fitness videos because he was Andy Fer, if you know Andy Fer, St.

Tork Whisler [00:56:46] Louis native, I guess. And first form Sawyer was big into fitness and first form and consumed a lot of Andy Fer consumed. A lot of Gary v introduced me to Gary V you know, I listened to a lot.

Vance Crowe [00:57:03] This is hustler culture. Yeah. This is go, go, go.

Tork Whisler [00:57:05] And he said, I think I'm going to, you know, chore pigs, and then I'm gonna work on my fitness and I'm gonna showcase it. I'm gonna start a channel. And I was like, all right, well, that's fine. Whatever, you know, get that sorcery away from me. I don't want anything to do with it. But like, very quickly, he did like little snippets of him on the farm. And that, like, that was way more interesting to people than the fitness or it, it,

Vance Crowe [00:57:34] It's just unique, right? There's not that many, there are a lot of fitness people. So

Tork Whisler [00:57:38] Then he, he started shooting just on a GoPro, and the YouTube channel started from that. And I, I was like all holding the camera, right? I didn't want to be in it. And it was a deal. What he didn't know at the time, I needed him way more than he needed me, because I knew with what was going on that there wasn't anything holding him there, even though, you know, he had that building. But if he would've said, dad, I don't, I don't wanna move wherever, you know, you can chore it, whatever, send me the check, you're gonna do that. So I knew he wasn't really stuck there, but if that really interested him, and if that made him happy, if that gave him purpose to do that, then I would support it because I needed him more than he needed me. And so then it wasn't very long that I said, you know, I probably said something, some smart ass remark. And he said, oh, say that again. And that was the beginning of this'll do. And that was the beginning of the, the YouTube channel. And it, it happened really, it was all organic. I mean, it was just, we just kept consistency. And social media is the thing. Like people ask, you know, what do you do? Well, we just, we just were brutally honest about who we were and what we did. And we showed, we showed what we did. Even when people were like, oh, I mean, there's a lot of, there's a lot of hog operations that at that time they didn't allow people to bring a cell phone into the sites, even if you were contracted.

Vance Crowe [00:59:19] Oh, yeah. All the biosecurity stuff. Yeah. All the, yeah. Yeah.

Tork Whisler [00:59:21] And everybody was so worried about PETA and some video getting out of a pig that was injured in one of the pens, you know, it was gonna look bad. Nobody wanted that shown. And Sawyer's like, I wanna show it all.

Vance Crowe [00:59:34] Yeah. 'cause then you've got their trust. Right, right. Then then you've, you know, the interesting, so Barn Talk came outta nowhere for me, right? Yeah. Like all of a sudden I'm like watching, you know, YouTube shorts and there's these guys that are having conversations about ag and at first I was like, oh, this isn't all that novel. They're just talking about what you hear guys talk about all the time. And then I was like, no, wait a second. You hear this when you're talking privately. Yeah.

Tork Whisler [00:59:55] But

Vance Crowe [00:59:56] You never hear this stuff online. And if you did, it'd be buried so deep in a podcast. Right.

Tork Whisler [01:00:01] That

Vance Crowe [01:00:01] A normie would never come encounter with it. Right.

Tork Whisler [01:00:04] But

Vance Crowe [01:00:04] Then I started watching what you guys were doing. I'm like, Hey, they're having real conversations about how much does it cost to buy that tractor? Yeah. And neighbor jealousy. And, and like, you know, what did your dad do differently than you? And it was like the most plain spoken ag conversations brought to the public in a way that I had just n never seen before.

Tork Whisler [01:00:24] Yeah. That was the purpose. We started with the, with the farm and the hog operation. And Sawyer was like, we're gonna show it all. We're gonna show loading pigs, moving pigs, treating pigs. And we even showed people, you know, the pig pigs die animal, if you're raising a lot of animals, they're gonna die. It just, under the best conditions, you're gonna get one that dies. And so we showed the whole process of what happens to a pig, you know, that dies and where it goes, and the rendering and all that. And then we are both consuming a lot of podcasts. I mean, Sawyer really got me hooked, but for Mosey and Gary v and Andy and, and Rogan, I mean, Rogan to me just was like, what, what really hooked me on Rogan was, if you've ever listened to his podcast, when he does his ads, like his sponsorships, he reads his sponsorships and he did a sponsorship. The first podcast I listened to Joe Rogan on, and I don't even know who was on it, but he was doing sponsorship with Cash App. And I'm not gonna say what he said about it, but he basically was like, you know, you need the blankety blank cash app card 'cause it's the blankety blank bomb. And I heard that and I was like, what, what company would let somebody represent their product like that? Just speaking like that.

Tork Whisler [01:01:55] And then I was like, he must have like one hell of an audience. And so then I started digging into him like, hell yeah. He's like the goat of that. So anyway, we, we love podcasts. And on our farm is the barn that my dad built the year he came home and started farming 1949. And it is a, it's an old hip roof barn. And we used a feral in it and keep sows in it. And it had a big hay mouth. And I've bailed a a lot of hay on Hot 4th of July weekends and put in there and don't use it. We didn't have any livestock that we needed bedding for. And so literally the straw that was wired tied from like 56, some of that was still up there in that bar. And those are the bales. There's the very bottom bales are the oldest ones. You know, we were up there one day and Sawyer's like, wouldn't you like to do a podcast? And I was like, I'd love to do a podcast. He goes, why don't we just, why don't we just clear this out? Just do it. And you know, old. So that is an example of old versus young because old me, I think if I had one message, I would want to get to older people. It is like that moment right there. Because to look at somebody young, their vision is bigger than this room. Like, he didn't see any of the work, he didn't see any of the problems.

Tork Whisler [01:03:29] All he saw was opportunity. That's all he saw. It was like, we could do this. We can do this 49-year-old torque looks at the world through the frame that he has put around, which you can call it wisdom, you can call it perspective, you can call it whatever you want. But wisdom to me, all wisdom is, is you've done enough things wrong that you start to realize that when some an opportunity comes, you compare it to other opportunities. And if it's closer to the ones that went wrong, you go, Hmm, we're gonna put that on the outside of this frame. 'cause that's probably not gonna go right. Yeah,

Vance Crowe [01:04:10] That's

Tork Whisler [01:04:10] Exactly. And if it's an opportunity that is close to something that went right, you go, oh, that's a good deal. And if it works, then people are like, oh, he's wise. You know, you're wise, you have wisdom. No, it's trial and error. And you've shrunk your world to where you only accept things that fit within that framework and you have no idea what opportunities you've completely missed because they're not even on your radar. So at that moment, I'm standing there and all I could see is all this shit is way out of my window of what will work. But I just swallowed hard and said, all right, well if you wanna do it, I said, let's, let's do it. I said, I'll, I'll help you clean this crap outta here, but you're gonna have to figure out how it's all gonna work. And so we did. And he was dating his fiance who his fiance now. And she helped us and my wife helped us, and we got everything out of there. And then we sat down, we literally sat down and we watched like every video version of podcasts that we could find. And we would look and go, what kind of camera you think

Vance Crowe [01:05:21] About? Yeah, what,

Tork Whisler [01:05:23] What boom mic is that? What's this? How big do you think that table is? How far do you think they're sitting apart?

Vance Crowe [01:05:29] I know this game real well. All that. And

Tork Whisler [01:05:31] Then we just went on the shopping, we went on our shopping spree and we got all the stuff and we had this big table and we set that table up there and we hung some boom lights and we got a road caster and we sat down and hooked everything up and messed around with a little bit. And then the very first episode of Barn Talk, which really isn't about, I don't think it's about anything. It, it might be a little bit about the history of the farm, but we're wearing, we're like in sweatshirts with stocking caps on, 'cause it's in the spring of, it's like in March and it's probably like 48 degrees in there. And there's no heat, no running water. Everything's run off an extension cord that is run off an extension cord that is run from the outlet on the grain bin that's like 30 feet from

Vance Crowe [01:06:21] Where the barn is because

Tork Whisler [01:06:22] The barn, all the wiring of the barn had plugged fuses and we plugged everything in. It just blew all the fuses. So we wired it, we had cords running to the grain bins to hook all this stuff up. But we did it. And I didn't. I edited. So at that point we were putting out content pretty consistently on this will do farm. And we were breaking the clips up ourselves. We, we weren't having anybody do that. And it took a lot of time. And Sawyer had me do clips some, I wasn't very efficient at it, but he said, okay, if we do this podcast, you're gonna have to edit it. So we got Adobe Premiere.

Vance Crowe [01:07:04] Ooh. And you've never done this before? Oh

Tork Whisler [01:07:06] No. Heck no I didn't.

Vance Crowe [01:07:07] Oh man. The learning curve. Like I'd rather learn how to snowboard at 50 than learn how to do Adobe. You know, like,

Tork Whisler [01:07:13] Well, so people ask, you know, like, why don't you guys use Final Cut? And I told your guy, the only reason that we used Adobe Premiere is because it had the most YouTube videos on how to use it of anything. So we were like, okay. So we just consumed a lot. That's

Vance Crowe [01:07:28] A great point. That's a great way to do it.

Tork Whisler [01:07:30] And Sawyer was very patient and it took me a long time, like took a lot of time, but I learned to edit, which I would recommend anybody that gets into doing, I don't care what you're gonna do,

Vance Crowe [01:07:42] You can't be a good podcaster if you've never edited before. Right.

Tork Whisler [01:07:45] Because

Vance Crowe [01:07:45] You don't actually understand how anything works. You don't understand that the video and the audio aren't connected. You have to stitch it together. You don't understand like what, what makes sound good. And then once you start editing, now all of a sudden you become hyper aware of everything you listen to being like, oh, that microphone's too far away from their mouth. You gotta, that's terrible. Yep. But you can't know any of that if all you're doing is sitting in the chair talking. Yep,

Tork Whisler [01:08:09] Absolutely. And that's, that's the greatest, I mean, that I really value that we did it. I don't, I'm not really all that interested ever going back to doing it because my mind doesn't work that way, but I could do it. And so we put that first episode out, and I don't even remember what it got for views, but it got some views and it was pretty decent. Like when we watched it on, when we listened to it and we watched it, the sound was pretty decent. And we were like, okay, I think we can do this. And the first few were just us because we couldn't get anybody to come. Like, who are you gonna get to come to Southeast Iowa to be on?

Vance Crowe [01:08:48] It's, it's not exactly easy to get to Washington County, Iowa. No. Like, there's no interstate that drives you up there. You gotta go, well, you know, you did it this morning.

Tork Whisler [01:08:56] Yeah. And so we, we prodded along and we, you know, it, I think a blessing that we had was on both of those endeavors. Like we weren't starving. Like we weren't doing that, trying to make it pay money right out of the gate. I mean, we were farming and we had that, we just wanted to make good content and showcase our lives as farmers. And Sawyer Sawyer had the vision. I mean, he totally had the vision. He said, 'cause I asked him, I said, what is your goal long term for this? I said, are you wanting to just make money from, from YouTube and whatever? And he's like, no, we're gonna launch a business. And I said, what's that? He goes, I don't have any idea. But he goes, we're gonna do this and we're gonna get an audience and we're gonna get people to know us and at some point we're gonna launch our own product. He goes, why should we want people to offer to sponsor us and sponsor what we're doing? Why don't we just create a product and then this will be our mechanism. We'll, we'll be our own sponsor. And this was in, this was in 2000 and 2001. And I was like, all right, well that sounds good. I, I didn't know what that was gonna look like. But we just kept hammering away, doing, doing, doing episodes and coming up with ideas.

Tork Whisler [01:10:34] And then one night I got a, a LinkedIn message from, from a guy who, well it was Mike Hanson, I don't think he care that I use his name. So he has a company called Barn Tools and it is an alarm system for poultry sheds and hog sheds. But they started with hogs and the product was called Barn Talk. And he, LinkedIn messaged me and I didn't know who he was, had no idea. He goes, Hey, my name's Mike Hanson. He goes, and I don't know if this is right, but do you have a, you guys are hog farmers, right? And you have a podcast called Barn Talk. And I replied and I'm like, yep. He's like, this is like divine. This is like divinity. We need to meet. 'cause I got a product called Barn Talk and I'd like for you guys to sponsor, I'd like to sponsor you guys. And so we were like, heck yes. And so we went like, we've heard stories of people trying to find someone to help them, you know, give them some income to help 'em Right. Hone their craft Yeah. And get better stuff and all that. Like, it literally just fell in our lap that we were hog farmers. We had this show, they had this product and we actually had Michael on the podcast. He was one, he was one of our first guests. I don't think he was our first guest, but, and we did, basically we just showed, they gave us the product, which we needed it.

Tork Whisler [01:12:10] We didn't have alarm systems that were worth a crap in our buildings. And so like, we used the product and we liked the product. And then they didn't have like a, they didn't have like a creative team that was coming up with ideas. So they were just like, yeah, just do something, you know, make something funny. You know, do this, do that. And so we came up with the content and we did that for a year with them. And that opened our eyes completely to what could be. And it helped us refine what we were doing. It stretched us a lot. And then we started getting a little bit of traction, and then we got a few guests and then we've just kept going. And what was funny is when Thistle Do Farm got to like 50,000 subscribers on YouTube, barn Talk might have had like 5,000. It was just putter because it was long form a lot of those, a lot of those podcasts were easily an hour and a half to two hours.

Vance Crowe [01:13:10] Yeah.

Tork Whisler [01:13:11] And, and I honestly didn't understand it because the audio version Yeah, I understood. But the video version, I couldn't imagine anybody wanting to watch watch us for that amount of time. But it just started to get traction. And then we started breaking down the clips from Barn Talk and we started putting those out on TikTok. And this was right when TikTok was starting to go. And we were actually a little bit late in that, but Instagram and, and TikTok. And then it was like, within, within like three months, barn Talk just blew right past this'll do Farm. And so today Barn Talk has like 192,000 subscribers and this'll do farm I think has like 92,000. It, it just, it's eclipsed. And to me, you know, the farm is more, it's, those are all like 15 minute videos and they're quick and we cut. It's a lot more interesting to me. But the conversations that you can have and, and this is, you know, what you do is amazing because getting people to sit down long enough that they can, they can not only tell you what they think, but they can tell you why the experience as to why they think that that is powerful.

Vance Crowe [01:14:40] Yeah. I always think that the, the podcasts that work are the ones where you have enough time that you can reference something in the beginning when you're telling your story and then an hour later Yep. You, we've had such a solid conversation that you're talking about something you said at the beginning that now makes all of the stuff towards the end all tie together. And that, that's what I mean barn talk because I I you guys have entered into the public consciousness in a way that I think almost no other podcast. 'cause most ag podcasts are for ag people. Yeah. And yours, you could be an ag like, but like it's for people that are like, oh, that's, that's the way their psychology is about the way they buy new tractors or putting together leverage, that kind of stuff. But like you could be totally outside of ag, not know anything at all about it and still enjoy it.

Tork Whisler [01:15:30] Yeah. Well, thank you. I appreciate it. When we started, that was our goal. So we felt like, we felt like the, the this'll do farm. Like that's a, that is us at far as farmers every day. Mm.

Vance Crowe [01:15:44] And

Tork Whisler [01:15:45] That's what we do. And it's all about that. But we wanted people to get to know us outside of that. So that was why we made the decision that we were gonna do, you know, we do a guest and then we do like a q and a. And the q and a a lot of times is pretty ag based. And then we do a hot topics. And the hot, the hot topics are are, yeah. They're hot topics. It's, you know, we talk about politics, we talk about society, we talk about we're, we talk about whatever we feel like talking about. And that has, that's allowed people to get to know us or for us to find an audience way beyond just ag. And it's, it's just amazing. And

Vance Crowe [01:16:30] What's a, what's a hot topic that you like? You, you were like, woo. Well, we're getting a little, we're getting a little close to the fire on this

Tork Whisler [01:16:35] One. Okay. Well, so the one I, the one will come out this week, but obviously we talked about, you know, the state of the union and that's just polarizing. You know, when you have, when you have a country that is this divided over which old white man they want to have run their country, you know? Well,

Vance Crowe [01:16:54] And there's a lot of talk now anti rural white guys. Yeah. Like, it's getting bizarre. I I, when I first heard that, I thought maybe Vance, you're a little keyed into this, you're pretty familiar with rural white men. Like maybe you're just like being a little overly sensitive. Now you're hearing it and you're like, no, for real. They are saying that the, that the end of democracy, that the civil war is coming because rural white men are nationalists and hate everybody. That's a different color and it's bad.

Tork Whisler [01:17:22] Yeah. So we actually, in that hot topics, we tie the clip to the two men that were on M-S-N-B-C that have written a book. And it is based on the thesis that rural white men are gonna be the end of democracy. And that clip's like seven minutes long where they say that we're homophobic, xenophobic, you name it, far right. Alter religious, la la la la all that stuff. And so we talk about that and

Vance Crowe [01:17:57] Well, let's stay on this. 'cause I think this is an interesting subject. 'cause a few years ago when COVID was going on, there started to be this movement from the east coast that said, we shouldn't allow homeschooling anymore. Right. And why not? Well, 'cause what these people are doing when they're homeschooling their kids is they're not making them love America. They're making 'em hate all the Yeah.

Tork Whisler [01:18:18] The

Vance Crowe [01:18:19] Gays and the Jews and the, you know, the brown people. And like, so I tried to write one of the original authors of this study, she had been out on all these mainstream places and I was like, Hey Harvard professor, come on my podcast. Because in my world, your article was really popular. In fact, I bet I know more people that read it than you do. Yeah.

Tork Whisler [01:18:38] And

Vance Crowe [01:18:39] She was like, no, can't talk about it. It's, you know, da da tried to put me off with some PR person. And, but that has grown so steadily since COVID that it's, it's wildly outta control that narrative.

Tork Whisler [01:18:53] Yeah. It, it doesn't matter what we talk about today. I feel like there's no, i, I don't, it's, I guess I don't know what the right words for it is, but, well, it's tolerance is what it is. There's so little tolerance for an opposing view. And then within our, within our country, every so many people have become all or nothing to where okay, most voters and most people politically, are fairly, there's a lot of points that don't mean very much to 'em. But there's one thing, there's one thing that is super important to them, whatever that is. Whether that be gay rights, whether that be climate change, whether that be you, you name it, whatever it is. And traditionally, I feel like to make a, to make a union work, you've got a group of people that all have that one thing they're very passionate about, but, and they aren't gonna agree. The person has the opposite view of that. They're never going to come together on it. But on a whole lot of other things for the good of the union, they can work together and they can agree that, okay, well these bridges need fixed or this, or, you know, the border or whatever.

Tork Whisler [01:20:38] But now the political world has spilled out into the, the psyche of our whole society in the fact that we talked about this and we continue to talk about it, that there are some subjects in our society that politicians given the chance to fix, won't fix. They would rather campaign on them when they have the ball, when they have the ball, they choose not to address 'em. And they do their best to make it look, to tell everybody that it's the other side fault that this isn't being dealt with. And then when they get the ball, when the other side gets the ball back, they don't fix it either. And yet somehow we are all being sold this idea that it's the other other people's fault. And it spilled out to where now it's, it's an us or them thing. So there are, there are people that believe that middle America, that we're all, we all can be lumped into one basket. And the, the men, the male part of it, men have been under attack in this country for a long time because we represented tradition. We, we represented tradition, we represented what always was.

Tork Whisler [01:22:13] And feminism first really didn't like men because men were the oppressors and we were the ones that were keeping all the women in the country barefoot and pregnant, you know, and a woman didn't have an identity outside of the man. So there was a big push that, you know, you need to throw off that and women need to blaze their own trail and all that. Which is true. I mean, I don't think anybody, I don't think anybody, well, there's probably some people that would argue against that, I imagine. But really, I feel as

Vance Crowe [01:22:52] If that narrative were true. Yeah.

Tork Whisler [01:22:54] If

Vance Crowe [01:22:54] That really were what was happening, you would wanna throw that off. Yeah.

Tork Whisler [01:22:57] The

Vance Crowe [01:22:58] Question is, was that actually what was going on? And, and because when I talk to people that are 70, 80 years old, they don't view the, the time when they were living in, in partnership with their husband. Right. That they had their responsibilities, their husband had their, but you can imagine somebody that had a bad situation Yes. Saw their dad really mistreating him, moved off the farm, went into the city and said, f that I'm never coming back to that. I'm gonna make my own way. Yeah. So you can see where we got to here. Yeah. But it's burning outta control.

Tork Whisler [01:23:29] Yeah. And, and so it's just, you know, it's, it's every generation or as time, as time has gone on, then you have what I call political opportunists that find, find a group of people that are disenfranchised and they have their own agenda, but then they, they commandeer that, that nerve, that problem, that perception. And then they, they just pile onto it and they try to, well divide, they, they try to get a bigger group of people that are upset about this or that, and it becomes tribal. And I think COVID, I think COVID really hurt that too. Or, or drove that more because it drove more people to have less one-on-one relationships or go to bowling or go to dark

Vance Crowe [01:24:29] Church is the big one. I say either or church, when you stop having people go to church, that's where people with all sorts of political ideologies can come together. Yeah.

Tork Whisler [01:24:37] Find

Vance Crowe [01:24:38] Out what is that person actually believe. Oh, they're not as bad as they're being portrayed on the news. Yeah. But when you knock that off and you're going to church over zoom or you're not going very often, all of a sudden all those people are disconnected from the rest of the world.

Tork Whisler [01:24:49] And then the people, when they started connecting online and in those groups, you're connecting with people that are a hundred percent your same viewpoint and you're not getting any, what, you know, you're not getting any other viewpoints. Right. And so as we went down that road, I think it just, the division just gets greater and greater and greater. And then people are, I have a very, I'm not very trusting of, of government. And, and here's my experience. This is my, this is my viewpoint of how I come to this. So I, the church that I grew up in, we, we went to that church and we go now, and at one point they asked me if I'd like to be an elder. And let's just be clear, the Presbyterian church is like, they're like the blueprint of the United States government because if, if there's, if decision being made, there needs to be three levels of committees to decide whether or not you should even vote on what you're thinking about doing. I mean, they love committees. The Presbyterian church USA loves committees and they want everything to be democratic. So we're not gonna make any hasty decisions. We're gonna, so within that structure, the pastors of a church, they don't have any power to do anything. It is the elders. It is the group that makes all the decision.

Tork Whisler [01:26:20] Does the church need a new roof? Well, we're gonna have the elders talk about it. And if they think that the roof needs fixed, then they're gonna get a committee and have people sign up that are people that know something about it. And then they're gonna decide, yes, we do need one. So then we'll vote to go get busy, you know, follow the whole thing. Okay. So I was an elder and I don't have a lot of experience with public serving on a public board or anything, but there was an older gentleman in that church owned a business, very successful guy. And they were talking about having to do some work on the plumbing and heating in the church. And it really wasn't a lot to debate about, but there were some people in there that were, they were of the thought, you know, these, you build a building and then it gets old. And so then do you spend the money to replace this stuff in this old building? Or you just say the heck with it, sell that, go buy some and build a brand new building. So there's some people that were thinking we should just build a brand new church. So there was some data debate about that. And I, I hadn't really thought about that. And I was kind of weighing that out. And I asked this guy, you know, what do you think? And he said, well, he said, here's, here's the thing, torque. He said, when you're, when you're an elder at your church and somebody wants to spend a little money, you look at it and you go, well, you know, we got the money to pay for that. It's no big deal. You know, we should probably do it. And he goes, and then if you're the, if you're on city council, your city and you see that it's a few more people's money, but it's still not a very big number.

Tork Whisler [01:27:58] But then those people become, you know, state representatives and they're like, it's a bigger number and it's more people's money, but it's like, ah, yeah, it's not that big a deal. But he said, then all those people that have done that, eventually, those are the people that are running the world. And now you see how, whether or not we fix the pipes or we build a whole new church, the people that wanna build the whole new church are the ones that end up running your country and the money is everybody's, but they also have the machine to print it so they don't have any skin in the game. And if you make, if you make the wrong decision for the church, you gotta live with all those people that are gonna go, you're the son of a bitch that you know and wreck

Vance Crowe [01:28:52] Our church. Yeah. Wreck

Tork Whisler [01:28:53] Our church. But when you're a career politician and you retire, you're only gonna hang out with all the rest of the career politicians. And there's, you don't have to answer to anybody.

Vance Crowe [01:29:01] Yeah. I was actually just talking with my good friend Keith Crosby today about this subject, which is the economy that is clear, if you ratchet those interest rates up now, all that money that the government owes, it's way bigger. Right?

Tork Whisler [01:29:15] And

Vance Crowe [01:29:16] You think, oh, these politicians, they should run around and fix this problem. Maybe they're worried about that, but the reality is no one is worried about that problem until it actually manifests as like things breaking down. It's not like your farm where you're like, Hey, I'm gonna make this decision and I gotta explain to my wife and my kids and you know, why we did this and we got bills coming up, we gotta change. Politicians don't think that way. They're dealing with what is going on right now. And causality, like time only goes in one direction. They never go backwards and say, Hey, this decision you made 10 years ago that now is costing us hundreds of millions of dollars, we're gonna punish you for that. It never happens. As long as you can keep going forward, then you never have to pay for any of it. And so, like my friend today was asking the, the backstop that had backed up all of the banking so that they could go and infinitely go get more money, even if they didn't have enough deposits for her today that runs out. And she was like, are you worried? You know, do you think this is gonna have an impact? And I'm like, I don't know, but there's no one in the news that's gonna talk about this. There's no one on in the political realm that's gonna talk about this because if it's not a problem that's popping up right now, there, there's no benefit to them to dealing with the problems.

Tork Whisler [01:30:29] Yeah. It, it's, it all is run on an election cycle. And to get back to, we were talking about, you know, the, the portrayal of rural America as being evil, what it comes down to is at the top level of our country, I don't think they care so much. What they really care about is they figured out that if we're bickering between ourselves, we're not, we're not calling for them to be thrown out like divide. As long as we're all divided as Americans, we're much easier to deal with. And you can disagree, you know, I, you cannot like what I talk about and you may not like me as a person, even though you don't know me, but just know that, you know, I'm not, I'm a flawed human being. We all are. And there's a lot what I believe to be right today and what I hold onto, it's from my experiences and from what I know tomorrow I could learn something that could change how I view and I go, shit, I was wrong. But I feel like we are limiting the opportunities for people to have those moments. I feel like as a country, we're getting further and further away from interacting with people that can broaden what we know about any, any subject.

Tork Whisler [01:32:06] Instead we're becoming more tribal to where we only wanna associate with people that share our exact viewpoint about everything. And by doing that, you are just setting, you're just setting yourself up. And we're setting our country up for, for a lot of struggle, a lot of struggle because all rural Americans aren't racist no more than everybody on the east coast is, you know, whatever. Yeah. Everybody on, everybody in California is a flaming liberal that doesn't know anything. You know,

Vance Crowe [01:32:39] I think like some of the big problems that you have to start years ahead of time to solve are not being solved because of this. Like, I think the biggest challenge and opportunity bar none in, in the world right now is there is going to be an insatiable, insatiable amount of energy needed. Yes. We are going to need more electricity in the next few years than has ever even been conceived of one we're reshoring a bunch of manufacturing, so that requires electricity and just look at Germany, they didn't, they didn't handle this right. And all they're losing all their manufacturing Bitcoin is going to have huge demands on energy and ai I was just listening to over the weekend, will take more energy than Bitcoin.

Tork Whisler [01:33:21] Yes.

Vance Crowe [01:33:21] And so if you want to use these things that are electric intensive, electric cars, all these things, we have to do so much more energy generation and nobody's talking about it. Yep.

Tork Whisler [01:33:31] Right.

Vance Crowe [01:33:31] Like right now, all we're doing is focused on climate change. We're not focused on like Yeah. But what happens if you have demands, things you want and you don't have enough electricity, well then the price of electricity goes through the roof and just to have your air conditioner on is gonna cost you an arm and a leg.

Tork Whisler [01:33:47] Yeah. And if you can solve that problem, if you can solve that energy problem, we have the greatest chance for the most peaceful existence that we've ever had in humanity's history. Because all of the wars we fight for the most, well, I think all the wars, all of, we fight, at the end of the day, it's all about resources. At the end of the day, we have fought whether that was clubbing, Igor, for the, you know, for the wooly mammoth ribeye all the way till what we're fighting all over the world about right now, if you can, and I, and we also have the best opportunity I think we've ever had to be able to overproduce energy. If, if government can get out of its own way and can allow, allow it to work. I mean I, the opportunity

Vance Crowe [01:34:43] There, it's only government in the way, right? Because anybody right now that looks out at the world and says, Hey, if I produce more energy, people will buy it. And then those people that buy it now all of a sudden people living in Africa that are trying to read with lanterns can now read with lights overhead. People living in the United States can do way higher end manufacturing. You can have all like the abundance that comes with more energy generation. And we've gotten stuck in this just vicious unending cycle about does or doesn't it cause climate change and what should we do about it? And instead of building more energy, I don't know where you're at on this one, we're building pipelines to move carbon from one part of the country to the other.

Tork Whisler [01:35:24] I'm not a fan, I'm not a fan of that one at all. But to your point on energy, do you, I I think this is right for all of the, for all of the political back and forth, you know, between our former president and the president we have now, I think today we're pro we're producing more oil today than we ever have. We ever have. However, the president we have does not wanna say that because he made some really dumb promises on the campaign trail and he wants to appear to his base to be anti anti-oil, anti traditional energy and pro climate change. So he doesn't wanna talk about it, but I'm pretty sure I, I saw this two different places that I think this year is on tap. We will produce the most, most oil that we have ever produced under his, under his administration. And he, he doesn't wanna talk about it, which

Vance Crowe [01:36:27] Good produce as much oil as you can. Yeah.

Tork Whisler [01:36:29] Good.

Vance Crowe [01:36:30] Like I was just in on the border between Alberta and Saskatchewan, there's this town called Lloydminster. And there these people in the rural part of Canada, they are really under the thumb of, of Toronto. Right. The city people are really putting it to 'em. And you think Alberta has 10 times the amount of gas and oil than Texas does. Yep. And Saskatchewan has uranium, huge uranium deposits. They could be energy independent and provide so much energy to the world that we're all better off for it. Like, who doesn't want to have it cost you less to be able to drive your car, take airplanes, have that cost less, have computers that, you know, your air conditioning it, whatever we need to do to heal the fight over this, to be able to make energy production as ubiquitous as possible is we should be focused relentlessly on that.

Tork Whisler [01:37:21] But I feel like there again, that is a, that is an opportunity that the political side of not only our country but the world, they want to control it. Like that can happen under their, if they're in charge and it can happen the way they want to have it, but it better not happen if the B teams in

Vance Crowe [01:37:46] Charge. Yeah. If somebody else has taken the, the froth off the top, they're, they're the ones that want the froth.

Tork Whisler [01:37:50] Yeah. It's, it, it's just, ugh. It's

Vance Crowe [01:37:54] A tough So you've had an opportunity to be interviewing presidential candidates. Yeah. You had Ron DeSantis and what, what, what does it feel like to go from being like, Hey, we're father and son talking in a barn to like, Hey, we're putting stuff out there that, that has an impact on the future.

Tork Whisler [01:38:09] It was, it was really exciting, I'll tell you. So that came together very quick. And if I had to, if I had to, you know, sum up what we're doing in like a piece of advice, our piece of advice, and we've said this 2023 was the year of just ask. 'cause we didn't really know, we didn't really know what was possible and we didn't really know who we should ask or shouldn't ask. So when, when all these people got into the, into the presidential race, we just started sending emails and trying to call numbers at the bottom of the screen on the, on their website or whatever. And you know, we didn't get anywhere with a lot of them, but we got, we got a, an email back from DeSantis campaign just saying that yeah, they'd totally be interested, but he's very busy. And if it ever happened that they would let us know, but we appreci you know, very nicely saying that, get away from me, you bother me. And so we didn't really think anything about it. We were honestly really focused on trying to get RFK on.

Vance Crowe [01:39:21] Hmm.

Tork Whisler [01:39:22] I think that would be a very interesting interview. So we were, we were, that one was still kind of on the burn. We were still trying and reaching out and on a Thursday night we get an email from DeSantis assistant press secretary and it was one of those where you got it and you're like, it might have been, is this a hack? Like, is this, 'cause it was very like not anything fancy, I guess it's just a regular, you know, regular person saying Hi, I am so and so from, and so I, I called Sawyer and I said, look at this. And I go, do you think, is that legit? He goes, you think that's legit? And I said, and he said, well, I, I don't know, let's tell 'em we wanna hop on a call. And they said, okay. So we get on a call and they said, we, we've seen your stuff and yeah, we think we'd totally like to do it. The president's gonna be in Ainsworth, the governor. Yeah. The governor's gonna be in, in Ainsworth, Iowa, which is about 15 miles from us and could we do it Saturday? And this was on Thursday. And I'm like, holy cow. We're like, you know, yeah we can. And we told our family about it and we were, you know, my dad always said, it never hurts to have company, you know, 'cause that's when you try to make everything look like nobody lives there. So we were in full blown, like Friday we're freaking out. And then Friday afternoon we get a call and it, it was this person's assistant said, Hey, this isn't gonna work.

Vance Crowe [01:40:53] Oh,

Tork Whisler [01:40:54] And, but we're gonna try to reschedule it. And we were like, oh yeah. So then they emailed the following week for the next Saturday and we didn't tell anybody because we did not wanna be those people. Like, oh yeah, we're gonna have Ron de Santa on and then the bus just drives by, you know,

Vance Crowe [01:41:13] You're like, oh

Tork Whisler [01:41:14] Boy. So Sawyer, we got everything ready. And he sent his, his, his security team to, you know, sweep everything. Which is pretty simple when you're on a farm. There isn't a lot of, you know, people around. And they were good. Everybody we talked to is really nice. You know, they're just regular people. I think that's the thing that, whether you're talking about, whether you're talking about politicians or music people or actors or whoever, at the end of the day, they might be a certain way. Some people get, you know, full of themselves. But the people that actually handle 'em and do all the stuff, that's just their job and they're just regular people. And they were, everybody in the DeSantis campaign was super nice. And so we got it all ready to go. And then Sawyer was like, we should probably like, you know, promo this a little bit, shoot some stuff. And I said, we are not putting anything out until we see that bus pull the driver. And then sure enough, here comes, here comes the bus. And he, they pull up and he got out and he was finishing a sandwich as he got out. You know, 'cause he'd just come from somewhere, was grabbing a bite to eat. And he was very pleasant, real nice guy. I think anybody that's in that, in that world is very guarded as far as he's got a persona that he puts out.

Tork Whisler [01:42:46] And of course he's gonna be nice. I think it's really hard to be genuine. I mean, I felt like he was as, he was probably as genuine with us as he would be with anybody in the media, just because we're pretty disarming. I thought the funniest thing about the whole experience was though when we put it out, the comments on Twitter, because they shared the link to it on Twitter and we did too. And X is like the wild, wild west. I mean, people are coming after you with freaking knives drawn and you know, they like to beat up on him that he's short and he wears platform boots. And there is a picture of the three of us standing there, Sawyer, DeSantis and me. And I'm shorter than all of 'em.

Vance Crowe [01:43:37] And, and

Tork Whisler [01:43:39] Somebody was ma you know, people were just making cracks that we put that picture on X and people were given talking about his boots being like, platform boots. And I was like, if anybody in this picture needs platform booth,

Vance Crowe [01:43:53] It's

Tork Whisler [01:43:53] Me. I don't know what your problem with DeSantis and Sawyer's like six two.

Vance Crowe [01:43:57] Yeah.

Tork Whisler [01:43:59] But I mean they, every detail, like the way he sat in the chair, the way he answered the questions, the, the lighting, like, you know, this was some hillbilly operation. You know, just any the, and that's that whole tribal bit. You know, the people that

Vance Crowe [01:44:19] They're probing for weakness. Oh, they're trying to find something that they can, any,

Tork Whisler [01:44:22] Anything to stir up the people that already think the way they are. And then the people that, you know, were pro DeSantis, they just thought it was the greatest thing since slice bread. And I had guys, there were some people around the state of Iowa that I'd never met that emailed me that were just so thankful that we had him on, like we had something to do with it, you know? But it was a great experience and it was hard because we had limited time. So unlike here where you can ask a question and then you, it sparks a conversation. There was no time for that because we had to move so quick. But I think that anybody that is in that position, it was obvious that when you decide you're gonna run for an office like that, they take you away somewhere. And they're like, today, today we're gonna talk about climate change and we're gonna spend the next eight hours just grilling you on every question that we can think of every different way we can think it. And then you come up with your answers. Because people would ask, oh, did you have to give him the questions ahead of time? No. Like they, I, 'cause we asked him, do you want our, do you want our outline? Or whatever. And they're like, no, you can ask him whatever you want. And because

Vance Crowe [01:45:39] He is gonna talk about whatever he wants. Yeah.

Tork Whisler [01:45:40] You know,

Vance Crowe [01:45:40] There's a famous line in media training where they're like, you should walk in with the, with the sense of who has questions for my answers. Right. Because I'm gonna give you whatever answers I wanna give you.

Tork Whisler [01:45:52] That's a hundred percent right. And I mean, he did talk about what he wanted to talk about the most, I'd say the most candid answer he gave was when Sawyer asked him about the, the football playoffs, the college playoffs. I mean, he, he was a little bit, I mean, he, he was, he was diplomatic about his answer, but you know, obviously he's a Florida fan and they kind of got, they kind of got screwed in that, in that Yeah. That deal. So, but he was very, you know, he was very gracious about it. But that was about the most like humanizing part of him being on there. But yeah, it was, it was a great, and that, that was kind of an aha moment for us that we were like, dang, you know, I guess we're, I guess we're more legitimate than what

Vance Crowe [01:46:43] We feel like we're, oh man, I saw that and was like, dang torque. What you doing up there? This is great.

Tork Whisler [01:46:48] So, and then that just, that just gave us bad ideas. So now we, we just, we email like, we're always just, we'll reach out to anybody. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:46:56] Like,

Tork Whisler [01:46:56] We'll reach out

Vance Crowe [01:46:57] To anybody. I'm totally fine being told no, you know, you never know who you'll have on. So one thing you guys have done in the last year is you've started your own brand. You are selling pork. Talk a little bit about that.

Tork Whisler [01:47:09] Yeah, so going way back there, you know, Sawyer, his vision was to build an audience and then launch a product off of that. Because those people that are your, your subscribers, that is your most loyal customer in the making. And we, we've seen there are brands out there that are direct to consumer selling meat, direct to consumer. However, even in that situation, most of them are their buying product from a cut facility. And then they're having a distribution center fulfill those orders. And so they're, they're selling what we call claims-based meat. Whether it be an antibiotic free chicken or grass fed beef or this or that, whatever. They're, whatever they're catches. They're, they're creating, they're creating a customer base on claims. And to us, all of that really isn't much different than, than what you're buying at the grocery store if it's stamped with that claim. And what we wanted to do was we made a channel out of showing people what we do every day and showing them where their food came from. And then we're like, well, why don't we let them get the food that we showed them that we were growing? And so we started the process of trying to find A-U-S-D-A inspected facility.

Tork Whisler [01:48:50] So

Vance Crowe [01:48:50] Not easy to do,

Tork Whisler [01:48:51] Not easy to do because if, if I have a locker across the border from the state of Missouri and I make beef jerky and you want some of my beef jerky, you can drive up there and you can buy it, put it in your car and drive it back to Missouri. That's fine. If you call me and say, Hey, I want 20 pounds of that really great beef jerky and my facility where I make it is not USDA inspected. Now it can be state inspected, but

Vance Crowe [01:49:18] Then you can only sell it inside the state. Correct.

Tork Whisler [01:49:20] And the funny thing about that is, and what we, so, so we've learned all this, now we're involved in all of this stuff within USDA and within the state of Iowa. And, you know,

Vance Crowe [01:49:32] It's absurd. Nobody looks at it and says like, oh, this is a coherent system. That makes sense. Yeah.

Tork Whisler [01:49:37] So the state of Iowa, the inspection, whether it be USDA or state, it's exactly the same. So you have to meet the USDA standard, even if you're just state inspected because they're the same. However, if you're not USDA inspected, you can't ship outta state. So that was difficult. There aren't a lot of places that are that way other than very large, like the jbss, the, the, the Triumph places like that. So we, we found a locker that family owned from Milo, Iowa, and they had just built a brand new locker coming outta COVID and had some capacity. And so we knew that we could get the pigs that we raised, processed there, and it was USD inspected. So then we were like, okay, we gotta get a distribution. And the only thing we knew to do was the model that everybody else had done, which is having a, a distribution center that's set up with, you know, huge freezer capacity and shipping every day and boxing and all that. And you have the product shipped to them and then they fulfill your orders, you build a website and then the, the order side dumps into their system and they fulfill 'em. Well, we talked to everyone that we could find and basically it's like, okay, well how many pallets a week are you gonna bring me? And as soon as you have that and you tell 'em, okay, we're gonna get like three pallets once a, you know, once a month. Hello?

Vance Crowe [01:51:06] I, I think he hung up on me because they're doing volume, they, they, yeah, volume, volume, volume

Tork Whisler [01:51:10] Volume's, all they care about. So that went nowhere fast. And so we then we went down the road that, okay, we're gonna build a freezer on the farm and we're gonna fulfill 'em ourselves. And we looked into that and it's like, oh, do you have three phase? Because if you don't have three phase for the size you're talking, it's gonna be whatever. So we ended up through just random Schwan foods, which if you grew up in the rural part of America, the Schwan man, the schwan man used to come around. Well they've had the same problems that everybody else has had in the fact that finding help is hard. Transportation costs are hard and fewer and fewer people to sell your product to. So they've gone direct to consumer. So they've started closing all of these individual warehouses that they've had scattered around the Midwest, and they're consolidating them to a ship to home model. So in our little town, there was a swan man and I happened to be driving down the street one day and I didn't go the way I normally go. Our town's town of 10,000 people, and here's a crane lifting the 10,000 gallon LP tank off of its purchase at this warehouse. And I'm like, what's going on there? So I call a local realtor and they didn't know anything, but they called around and they're like, yeah, they're closing it. So I got on the phone with Schwan, got transferred, got transferred, got transferred, and finally get ahold of some guy that's in, in charge of their, like as asset management, I think is what it was.

Tork Whisler [01:52:47] And he said, yeah, we're gonna be selling this property, but it's not for sale yet. We're listing it through a commercial real estate, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I'll take your information and then, you know, have somebody get ahold of you. And so then we went about another three months and they wanted an insane amount of money for it, but they didn't end up selling it. And right next to where it is, there was a construction company that we had know the people that own it very well. And we went over there and Sawyer to his credit, was like, you know, you should buy this because if you don't buy this, somebody's gonna buy it and they're just gonna trash it. And the next thing you know, you're gonna have junk cars sitting around there and it's gonna look terrible and you, you guys just need to buy this. And so they dicked around with them for however long and they ended up buying it and they leased us the freezer and the office space because all they really wanted was the big parking lot.

Vance Crowe [01:53:39] Wow.

Tork Whisler [01:53:40] And we've, and they've been super good to deal with. So we've got two parts of the puzzle, the most interesting part of our journey and is different than what most people would think is we contract feed pigs for somebody else. We don't own those pigs. We take care of 'em, but we don't own them. So we had to make a deal where we would purchase the pigs from the guy whose job is to raise pigs and sell 'em to their traditional markets. And if they said no, everything that we work towards isn't gonna work because we gotta get these pigs. And Sawyer was so stressed out about it and he built this slide deck, you know, and we go down there and, and by the way, these are the people that I used to work for, so I have a relationship with all of them. And so I mean, it, it was good, you know, it was, it was about as good as you could get as far as knowing what you're walking into, but it was very interesting because we sat down and Sawyer started pitching his vision, what we were gonna try to do, and showing people where their food comes from and all that. And we get, we we're about 20, 20 minutes into this and the, the CEO, I'm sorry, the CFO at that time, he finally just leaves in. He goes, so are you, are you like wanting us to like invest in this? Are you looking for money? And I, it's, Sawyer just kind of looks at me and I go, no, we just, we just wanna buy the pigs.

Tork Whisler [01:55:15] Like we'll pay you the price that you would get delivered to the packing plant, but we wanna deliver 'em to our, our locker, and then we wanna mark the meat. And he goes, oh. He goes, you should have just led with that. He

Vance Crowe [01:55:27] Goes,

Tork Whisler [01:55:28] Yeah, we're fine with that. He goes, I'm just happy that you would actually, that you would actually buy 'em from us and not just mark 'em down on the death loss sheet and steal 'em from us. Wow. I was like, so anyway, they were, they were fine with it. So the first, the first group we did what they call a, a, a drop because we were bootstrapping this. So we actually sold the boxes before we processed the pigs. And that gave us the capital to pay for the pigs and get the processing.

Vance Crowe [01:55:58] And

Tork Whisler [01:55:59] Then we shipped them and it went, it went really, really well. We learned that we had a really horrible box and we had pictures sending, we had people sending us pictures of boxes that looked like a soccer ball, like just, and we had a few orders that absolutely they didn't get there. Like we still don't know where they went, or they just didn't, they probably threw 'em into a dumpster somewhere. So we learned we need a lot better box. And, but we also learned that that story of knowing where your food comes from, people that is valuable to people.

Vance Crowe [01:56:33] Oh, I mean, it makes such a big difference. You got little kids and you're like, oh, this comes from, this is Ring Brothers beef. This is, you know, it'll do farms.

Tork Whisler [01:56:41] And so then the next step in that was we wanted to do what we were doing on our farm for other people. So there's, there's a lot of people that share their story on social media as farmers. So there's a guy named Cole Sone from South Dakota, and he has a pretty large YouTube channel called Sone Farms. And they raise, they raise cattle. And so our first like partner experience was, we had him deliver his cattle to Milo. We purchased the cattle, but then we put together what we call a curated box and it's all his beef. So he, and then we pay him a bonus, like he was marketing it, you know, himself, but he doesn't have to do all of the

Vance Crowe [01:57:29] Logistics. Oh man, that's fantastic. And all

Tork Whisler [01:57:31] That. And so that went really well. And he's gonna do another one. And then the Peterson brothers, they're gonna do a drop with us this summer. They

Vance Crowe [01:57:39] Bringing cow. Oh, that'll be huge. Yeah. That's great.

Tork Whisler [01:57:42] And we're gonna, we're gonna have chicken. We got a guy from Pennsylvania, which I honestly don't know how this pencils, because unlike beef, there's not a lot of margin in chicken anyway, but we're gonna make it work that he's gonna deliver us chicken. And he actually has his own USDA inspected processing because he sells 'em out there to grocery stores. Mm.

Vance Crowe [01:58:06] But

Tork Whisler [01:58:07] We're gonna sell 'em direct to consumer. And then we just, we just launched individual cuts. So when we started, we only did like, curated boxes because we had to try to use that whole hog.

Vance Crowe [01:58:20] Oh yeah. And when you start separating it out, all of a sudden you got pork butt you can't get rid of Right. When, because everybody wants bacon.

Tork Whisler [01:58:26] But we've, we've, I think we've broadened out enough that now we're comfortable that we're getting individual cuts so you can build your own box off of it. And he, we started shipping in late July, early August, and I wanna say, I wanna say for the year that ended the 31st, I wanna say we did, I think we grossed about $150,000.

Vance Crowe [01:58:54] Congratulations. Which

Tork Whisler [01:58:55] Is pretty good. Yeah. And this year, the, the goal is just to make everything flow better. The website, it's, you know, every little thing that you want to have as far as functionality on a website,

Vance Crowe [01:59:11] Somebody's gotta do,

Tork Whisler [01:59:12] Somebody's gotta do.

Vance Crowe [01:59:13] That's, I just learned this process. I just built a new website and you're like, when I remember doing this before, it wasn't that big of a deal. Yeah. Well you weren't running a full on business on it where people are putting money into this thing. Like you really gotta handle everything. Because

Tork Whisler [01:59:25] When he started, he's like, well, I'm just gonna do a Shopify store. You know? And then you see people, what you don't understand is yes, you can do that on a Shopify store. And there's a lot of things that, so Shopify is the backside,

Vance Crowe [01:59:40] The

Tork Whisler [01:59:41] Actual transactions are running through Shopify and they're great at it. And they, they make it really, they do a really good job, but the functionality they're not very good at. So most sites that you see that are a, a Shopify account, they're heavily moed, they call it. So there's people that build, they build the front side, which are mods to make it look and function the way you want it to be. Perfect. You know what people expect,

Vance Crowe [02:00:09] Man. That's when you find out that a good web designer is like worth their weight and gold. I mine Ashley Villareal was like amazing. And the things that she did for my website, like you think I would, if I had have done it myself to try and save money, it would've cost me way more than the amount I paid her.

Tork Whisler [02:00:27] Yeah. When I look at it, when I get on there, it like, it's, I kind of, I kind of, I kind of have to pinch myself because it's so good. It's hard for me to believe that that's, that's farmer grade. Like that's farmer grade. 'cause it, it works. I mean it's,

Vance Crowe [02:00:48] I love

Tork Whisler [02:00:48] It. It's top on.

Vance Crowe [02:00:48] I love, I was on your website today. It was great, man.

Tork Whisler [02:00:52] And the, the goal with all of that, with everything that we're doing is kind of what, when Lexi Merrick was on here, our goal, our overriding goal, everything we do is legacy. So we want there to be an opportunity that a seventh generation can farm if they want to try it.

Vance Crowe [02:01:15] Because you're the fifth Sawyer's the sixth.

Tork Whisler [02:01:17] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [02:01:18] And his kids would be the seventh.

Tork Whisler [02:01:19] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [02:01:20] That's amazing.

Tork Whisler [02:01:21] And we know that you're not gonna do it off a grain farm in 400 acres. And I don't think, I honestly don't think that you're gonna be able to do it off of contract finishing. I think that business is gonna get

Vance Crowe [02:01:32] Well, there's a level of freedom to cut that middleman out if you can do it right. And, and and, and it's freedom for everybody. It's freedom for the producer and it's freedom for the consumer. Not that there's anything wrong with the middleman. There's a place for the middleman, but it can be a good, a growth world without it, you know, before we wrap up, you, one time we met at the Farm for Profit thing. And I remember sitting there and you told me a, a metaphor about keys. And I was like, that is a, that is a really good metaphor. Yeah. Would you describe that for me?

Tork Whisler [02:02:01] Yes. And I'll tell you that I'm not, it's, it's not working. It's not working the best for me. But there's still hope that I'm gonna get that done. So, and I can't take credit for it. I, I ran into a guy that we actually, we actually built some sheds for and I got to know him really well, him and his family. And he was about my age, I wanna say he was about 55 years old, and this would've been probably mid two thousands, I would say. And I, he was asking about my kids in about, you know, what I was doing. And, and I asked him, I asked him something about, 'cause his, he had two boys that farmed with him and they had a bunch of rentals. And my oldest son was getting into rentals at the time. So I think that was the conversation. And he said to me, he said, yeah, he said, my goal today is to just hand off keys. And I said, what do you mean? And he said, well, he said, you know, when you, when you're young, your parents, you don't worry about the house being locked up and you don't worry about, you might have the key to the car that you drive to school with a learner's permit. And then, and then you get your car, you know, and you got keys to it. And then you might have an apartment and you add that key. And then you start a business and you get a key. And then you have company trucks for the business. And you add a key and you add a key, and then you do this. And all through your life, kind of every accomplishment I've had, I just get another key.

Tork Whisler [02:03:33] And you don't think anything about it until one day he said, you get to be my age. And that roll of keys on your hip starts to feel really, really heavy because every one of those keys is like a phone call that you could get when something goes wrong. It's a responsibility that you have. And you, he said, there's like a tipping point where all you wanna do is acquire more keys, but then you get to a point where you look at that and that's all a burden kind of. And you're like, man, I'd really like to give these keys to somebody. And he said, so my goal now is each one of my kids, I keep trying to just pawn more keys off on 'em until eventually I have no keys and it's all their responsibility. And that, that really, like, it came back to me. And I'm very blessed in that I'm involved. So my sons have, they have a real estate business that they each are part of. And then we, my wife and I are a little bit involved in part of that real estate. And then obviously Sawyer and I farm together and then we're doing the social media together and I love it and I really enjoy it. But I'm a little bit that way in the fact that I can feel myself getting to that point where, so as an example, like today when the farm needs something, if we buy a piece of equipment, like we just bought a, a new, new skid loader that's Sawyers.

Tork Whisler [02:05:09] Like whenever we do something today, I want it to be in one of the kids' names because I don't, I don't need that key. Like the, the, the identity crisis, I guess you could say. I had, when I stepped away from that whole livestock energy when I said that I felt like I didn't have my, my who I was. Yeah. Who am

Vance Crowe [02:05:30] I? Yeah,

Tork Whisler [02:05:31] I think I've come far enough that I know who I am and I don't need any more keys to prove to anybody than it is. And I just kind of like, it's very, it's more enjoyable for me to watch my kids build things and succeed. And if they, you know, they carry me along. I think as much out of, I'm kind of a comfort level. Like they like to have me involved because I supposedly have the wisdom, but I don't really, I just, I'm just sping is all I'm

Vance Crowe [02:06:01] Doing at this point. Well, and you're giving 'em the support they need to, to try things out, you know?

Tork Whisler [02:06:05] Yeah. So at the end of the day, I'm hoping that before too long I can just get rid of all the keys and then I can just bum off of them whenever I want something.

Vance Crowe [02:06:14] Well torque. This has been fantastic. If people wanted to buy, buy your pork, where would they go?

Tork Whisler [02:06:21] Yeah, farmer grade.com is the, is the website for the direct to consumer meat business at, at Thistle Do Farm. Pretty much on all social is the Farm Channel. And then at Barn Talk or at Barn Talk Show, we couldn't quite get 'em all latched down on everything else. And we're pretty much on all social.

Vance Crowe [02:06:45] Well, I'll throw that in the show notes man. Thank you so much for coming by. Yep.

Tork Whisler [02:06:48] Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. Ah.