Imagine that you’ve dreamt of raising a family on the century farm you grew up on, but due to challenges faced by previous generations, you’ve been left just one cow and five acres with which to start. Explain how you would build a sustainable life as a farmer.

It’s a great essay question, but for Morgan and Tyler Hibbs, this is not a practice exercise -- it’s real life. And how they’ve gone about living it just might be a blueprint for the next generation.

The couple is the team behind HB Flowers & Beef, a small farm in rural Tiffin. It’s not all they do – both Morgan and Tyler work for the Clear Creek Amana Community School District, she as the middle school ag teacher, he as the grounds manager. But they’re ambitious, and one day it might be.

“Tyler and I have a vison of one day having a storefront on the farm where we can sell flowers and direct market our beef,” Morgan says on a winter afternoon when we meet in her classroom. “Right now we sell quarters, and Tyler built me a really nice end-of-the-road farm stand that I sell the flowers at in the summertime.”

Today the pair live in their recently built shophouse on 5.5 acres with their two young sons. A quarter acre is dedicated to high intensity flower farming; Morgan grows over 2,000 plants spanning some 30 species of annuals here every summer, including dahlias, zinnias and sunflowers.

The acres were originally part of her grandparents’ century farm, where the Ball family raised pigs, cattle and crops. The pigs are long gone thanks to industry restructuring in the late 1990s, and upon retirement, her grandpa sold off all the cattle. Her uncle continues the row crops.

Well, actually, one cow from Grandpa’s herd wasn’t sold; her name was Josie.

“She was really special,” Morgan says. “We showed her at 4-H and then we kept her.” That started a purposeful retention of 4-H livestock, perhaps with an eye toward the future. “When I graduated from high school, we probably had about 10 cows with my dad, and it was just a hobby.” Today, the Hibbs-Ball herd is over 25 head, and the whole family helps out with care and feeding.

Morgan always knew she wanted an ag-related career, but she wasn’t sure how to specialize. When she went to Iowa State for college, she hoped to study animal science, but the classes were always full, so she ended up biding her time in horticulture courses – something she ended up loving, “which was shocking to me,” she says.

“I didn’t grow up with a garden,” she explains. “We would maybe plant tomatoes in a bucket, and that would be the extent of our garden.”

Although her love for growing flowers seemed to come out of nowhere, she later learned that her great grandma was cut from a similar cloth. And so, once graduated with a degree in ag communications, Morgan began growing flowers, eventually evolving a little plot into a little business where she can produce a couple dozen bouquets a week and provide arrangements for several weddings a year.

If it sounds like Morgan and Tyler have a lot going on, they do: they’re growing their family, careers, and farm from the ground up, all at the same time. Sometimes making progress toward their goals seems to happen so slowly it can be discouraging.

“It takes so much time and consistency and grit,” Morgan acknowledges. “[There are days when] I’m exhausted after teaching and cooking supper and bath time, getting the kids in bed, and then I’m like, Okay, I gotta go do a wedding proposal. Those types of times I’m like, Am I crazy?

“But at the end of the day, it’s worth it,” she continues. “To be able to live on the farm and raise our kids where I grew up and watch them learn how to do chores and how to take care of animals, and just the life lessons that the farm brings. It makes it worth it, even if it’s a lot of working hard.”

Being a farmer in 2026 is a different animal than it was in the 20th century. A successful operation requires multiple revenue streams, and some of those might be digital in nature; the Hibbs’ have experimented with podcasting and a YouTube channel, for example. In order to survive and thrive, maxims like “competition is good” often need to be replaced with “cooperation is better,” otherwise no one gets any traction. Perfectionism has to be put out to pasture; consistency matters far more.

Sharing this experience – through her blog, with her students, while hosting farm visits -- is something Morgan puts a premium on.

“For the longest time I just felt like a small fish, and I still sometimes feel like a small fish, when you talk about farms around us that are full-time and pretty big operations,” she says. “But just sharing it has given me confidence to say, every farm matters, no matter what size.

“Every farm, no matter what size, has the same challenges,” she continues. “Whether you have 10 cows or you have 100 cows, you still have calving season, you still have waterers that freeze in the winter, you still have hay you have to harvest and give to the cows. The size is going to change, but the problems stay the same and the successes stay the same. So celebrating that all sizes of farms matter and not feeling like I’m an imposter [is valuable].”

There is a season for everything, Morgan says. In this one, supply of HB Farms’ Sim-Angus beef – grass fed, grain finished, and antibiotic free – is limited, and fresh flower bouquets are available most weekends late summer.

In the next season, perhaps, the farm will get a deep freezer so the Hibbs can offer individual packages of beef, and a greenhouse so they can extend the flowers’ growing season. Then, perhaps, the farm store will follow, filled with a variety of locally produced products and space for flower drying and wreath-making workshops.

“One step today will take you another step tomorrow,” Morgan and Tyler remind themselves when the going gets tough. They write down their goals, start slowly, and try things until they find what works.

And they rely on their support system.

“We wouldn’t be able to do any of this without my grandma and my dad,” Morgan says. “It’s definitely a family effort, and it definitely takes all of us.”

Learn more about HB Flowers & Beef, including how to purchase beef and flowers, at hbfarms.shop.