by Jason Brown
Those summers taught me that landscaping was about more than just cutting grass or planting a few flowers. When done right, it could move people deeply, even to tears. For us, the work—at least a lot of the work—was routine. It got to the point where Ducie and I could almost do it blindfolded. But for the people we worked for, the results were never routine. For them, a more beautiful yard was a blessing—something that made their lives a little bit better, a little bit more beautiful. Those tiny plots of land became retreats for them—places to unwind after work, sip a lemonade, and get away from the day’s stresses. Our labors, in some small way, improved their lives.
Those summers taught me what an awesome impact you can have through service. Working with my dad also familiarized me with some tools and techniques that would come in handy. It taught me how to make vegetation look beautiful. I knew how to plant on a small scale.
But farming? That’s completely different. To compare running a farm with landscaping someone’s backyard is a little like comparing playing a real game of NFL football with firing up Madden NFL on your PlayStation. Sure, you can find some similarities, but they go only so far.
When you’re dealing with a relatively small suburban yard, you can control that environment to a degree. You calculate most of the variables and inputs. You can test the soil and know that it’ll be fairly uniform. You can see how the sun strikes the land and know what’ll grow well where. The parameters for the project are cozily limited.
But with a farm, you’re dealing with a ton more logistics and challenges. Every acre you manage and every new crop you grow adds new levels of difficulty. You can control some of those variables. You take soil samples all across your farm every two or three years, adding nutrients and adjusting the pH (acidity) levels so that there’s a certain amount of consistency and so the soil fits what you want to grow there. You’re thinking about runoff and erosion—elements you don’t typically have to consider when you’ve got a small vegetable garden in your backyard. You want whatever topsoil you have to stay good and healthy and in one place for years to come.
And then on the back end, come the harvest, you have to think about how you’re going to gather all that food you’ve actually grown. You’ve got to have a place to put it or ship it, and you’ve got to get it there quickly, because fresh produce has a short shelf life. Fruits and vegetables deteriorate, and some deteriorate faster than others. Much of our summer produce—cucumbers and tomatoes and peppers, for instance—must either be chilled right away or go someplace the very day we harvest it. The logistics can be a nightmare at times. First Fruits Farm’s main mission is to get food to the people who need it most. Anytime even a little of the food we harvest spoils or goes to waste, we know that we’ve failed to help someone. A family needed a meal, and we didn’t provide it. Farmers must have more than green thumbs. They need to be accountants and scientists and managers and, above all, jugglers—wearing all those hats and handling a ton of details sometimes simultaneously.
But I didn’t know hardly any of this when I quit the NFL. Working part time for my dad’s landscaping business didn’t prepare me for it all. I wasn’t necessarily starting off at ground zero, but my expertise in this field of play was pretty narrow.
So I started watching YouTube videos.
Online Agriculture Education
People laugh at me when I tell them that. “Really?” they say. “You learned how to farm through YouTube?” But, for me, it was very natural—thanks to football.
When you play for the NFL, a big part of your job is watching film. We studied hours and hours of game film every single day. You break down your own work from the last game, using it to correct your mistakes and improve. You study film of your opponent, looking for the tiniest tendencies and tells that might help give you an advantage. Some days you can watch so much video that you walk away bleary eyed. But all those hours in the film room taught me how to break down what I saw on video and emulate it.
So, when I started watching YouTube videos on how to farm, I felt right at home. It was natural for me to learn that way—watching those experienced farmers plow and plant and tend to their crops. I’d watch the videos, break them down, and have full confidence that I could reproduce what I saw on my own farm.
That wasn’t the only area where my first career helped me pursue my second. Football and farming share more similarities than you’d think. First, they both take place on a field, though the ones I “play” on these days aren’t marked off by the yard. Both require a great deal of planning and preparation, and both can be incredibly physically demanding. Both even have a sort of playbook, though for farmers, our playbook is the Farmers’ Almanac. It’s filled with tons of information you need in farming, from long-term weather trends to gardening tips to recipes for how to cook what you just grew. The similarities between football and farming are endless. So even though I was stepping into unfamiliar waters, I found that many things felt surprisingly similar. Although I couldn’t anticipate every challenge that farming would entail, the familiarity I felt with some aspects of my new career helped me take the inevitable challenges in stride.
In fact, when the first storm of my new career blew in, it didn’t hit the farm at all. It hit the bank.
Cash and Crops
We bought First Fruits Farm in late 2012. I wasn’t planning on starting to farm until 2014. We wanted to concentrate on getting our hundred-year-old farmhouse renovated and brought up to code—a suitable place to raise what we hoped would be a large family. We needed to make plans for how this farming business would work. Farming is expensive. You’ve got to have the right equipment, and that costs money. You’ve got to budget for fuel and maintenance. Hiring the labor to get it all done can be pricey as well. We never planned on donating everything we grew to charity. I didn’t know exactly how the harvest ratios would break down yet—how much we’d donate and how much we’d sell. But I envisioned that we’d probably give away 10 to 20 percent of our crop and then market and sell the rest to cover the farm’s overhead.
Tay and I weren’t necessarily expecting to turn a profit from First Fruits Farm, not with the charity work we wanted to do as part of it. Our goal was simply to break even. But breaking even would’ve been just fine, because the NFL had made me a pretty wealthy man. And I was expecting to stay that way.
That would’ve made me an exception to the NFL rule.
Listen, not many NFL players are hurting for cash while they’re competing. In fact, most professional athletes—at least the athletes in major televised sports—make a pretty good living as long as they’re active. If you play in the NFL for a handful of years, and as long as you’re not crazy stupid with your money, you’re going to leave the sport reasonably wealthy.
Sadly, few NFL players stay that way. Some years ago, Sports Illustrated found that 78 percent of NFL players either declare bankruptcy or are in dire financial straits just two years after they leave the league. For every Josh Jacobs, who grew up homeless before finding fame and fortune in the league, you have players who find themselves following the opposite trajectory: they find unimaginable wealth while playing and then become destitute later. For many, professional sports can be a rags-to-riches-to-rags story.
Why do athletes tend to fall on such hard times? Sometimes these players’ lives are upended by problems that followed them to the NFL or that the NFL’s lavish lifestyle encourages. Drug addiction can be an all-too-common problem for many. But often it’s just financial mismanagement. Not many folks have experience handling seven- or eight-figure salaries, and often players don’t know how to handle all that money that comes pouring in. They spend it almost as soon as they make it, imagining that it’ll never run out. Many give extravagant gifts and loans to friends or family members who, of course, never pay them back. And sometimes they simply make bad investment decisions.
When I left the league, I was determine
d that wasn’t going to be me. I’d funneled money into what seemed like smart investments. And just like the experts say, I diversified. If one investment avenue blew up, the others would still be making money. I invested close to $5 million in stocks with a massive, well-regarded national institution. The company knew a thing or two about investments.
I had another $3 million invested in a promising indoor aquaculture business—a fishery, in other words. The aquaculture industry was booming in Maryland at the time, and Waterland Fisheries—the company I invested in—was doing a strong business in farming tilapia. In 2008, when they shipped their first batch of fish, they planned to eventually raise as much as 1.5 million pounds of fish every year.
And then, knowing that the bulk of my money was in some reasonably safe investments, I took another $500,000 and started a venture-capital group with a couple of other investors—a company that took risks in start-up businesses like you see on the show Shark Tank.
I assumed this would make for a pretty healthy nest egg. Based on the history of these investments, I was anticipating returns of around $1 million annually. If I hadn’t owned the farm—if I’d just settled into retirement—those proceeds would be enough to live off comfortably for a long, long time. It was also enough to get First Fruits up and running. We could buy the equipment we needed with that money. We could purchase seeds and fertilizer. We’d be able to hire help. And in the coming years, if the harvest wasn’t strong or the market went south, my NFL income would give my family and me enough to live on. We wouldn’t have to worry and stress over weather and pests like most other farmers do. We had a backup—a cushion—to soften whatever blows might come our way.
I didn’t think Tay and I would have to worry about finances for the rest of our lives. Whatever God had called us to do on our farm—whatever crazy ideas He might have up His sleeve—I knew I had the resources to see those ideas through. Like Joseph in the Bible, I’d stored up my wealth. Even if my farm struggled, I was ready.
Being comfortable financially allowed me to be comfortable with this new life.
Comfortable. I laugh at that word now.
Those who follow a prosperity-gospel form of Christianity believe that God wants us to be comfortable and that He’ll provide us the means to find us that comfort. They think, Oh, I’m going to follow Jesus all the way to a comfortable life. But that’s not what Jesus says at all. He tells us, “Look, if you’re going to be My disciple, you’re going to have to measure the cost” (see Luke 14:27–33). Even Jesus—the very Son of God—wasn’t comfortable in His time on earth: “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head,” He says in 9:58. Jesus is telling us, “Hey, I don’t even have a bed to sleep in at night. I’m about My Father’s business.” He didn’t care about comfort. He wasn’t looking for comfort. He had a job to do.
I knew all that. I was very aware that my comfortable life had contributed to an impoverished relationship with God—that money can sometimes be a spiritual distraction. But now my money was invested for ministry. Instead of working for me, my finances were going to work for God and for the security and stability of us, his dutiful servants. God would honor that devotion, right?
God had already been incredibly generous to me and my family. He restored and redeemed us, setting us on a better, more loving path. He’d given us a farm. We saw yet more evidence of that in December 2012, when we welcomed our third child. Noah was born at the farm, not at the hospital—yet another gift. I knew God’s generosity would continue. God is good, all the time. That’s what the song says, and the Brown family was living proof of it.
But I wanted to take the next step—to go deeper in my relationship with God. So, in that period of calm and comfort, I prayed a new prayer.
“God, You’re amazing,” I said. “You’ve done some amazing things in my life. You’ve just begun writing a beautiful testimony in my life—a real testimony that will make people think about You and Your goodness. I know that there’s so much more to write, God. Keep developing my testimony. Make my life something that when people look at me, when people hear my story, they can’t help but see You through it all.”
Then I said something I hadn’t planned on praying. To this day, I don’t know why I prayed it. Maybe I knew that for people to see God in my life, they’d need to see, to feel, how much I trusted Him to take care of me, in good times and bad. I wanted to emulate the heroes in the Bible—those people who were so close to the Almighty that they relied on Him as they would a flesh-and-blood father.
I added, “God, I want You to take me to a place where I depend on You. Where I lean on You for everything. Where I cry out to You, God.”
Be careful what you pray for.
Flood
As we were renovating the farmhouse and caring for our new baby, Noah, we began to experience a storm of our own. Stocks were hot in 2013. The Dow-Jones Industrial Average rose 26 percent that year. The S&P 500 did even better.
Everyone was making money. Except for me.
We trusted our financial adviser at that large investment firm. We had faith that she would make wise decisions that would not just preserve the principal we gave her but also earn a healthy return. That didn’t happen. Our adviser dropped the ball countless times. Every month, our balance dropped. Every month, our principal diminished until it was almost entirely gone, drowned in a deluge of bad financial decisions. When I asked her what had happened to the millions we had given her, the millions we had entrusted to her, she made no apologies and certainly made no amends.
“Mr. Brown, you know there are no guarantees with the stock market,” she said. “You know that when we entered into our financial arrangement, you signed this disclosure and that disclaimer, right? I’m sorry, Mr. Brown, but there’s nothing we can do. Your losses are your losses.”
Honestly, I still don’t know what happened—if there might be some recourse that we could take, some person or some company that we could blame. Was it the market? Was it the adviser? I don’t have the financial savvy or the time to dive into the issue myself. And for the past several years, we haven’t had the money to hire an attorney to explore the issue for us.
Meanwhile, Waterland Fisheries was going under too. The fishery, which had become the largest seafood producer in Maryland, had been battered by storms, and in late 2012, the roof literally fell in on the business. When the company turned to its insurance provider for the funds to rebuild, the provider didn’t want to honor the insurance claim. Waterland took the insurance company to court, and eventually they settled. Apparently, that settlement didn’t save the aquaculture business, which went bankrupt. Not long after, it closed its doors for good, and all its tangible assets were sold off. Those sales didn’t help Waterland’s investors (like me) recoup any money. When the company was liquidated, the banks were the first in line to use its assets to pay off some outstanding loans. I received nothing.
For years, I’d put a good chunk of my NFL paychecks into these investments—investments that I knew I’d need to rely on when my playing days were done. Now almost all that money was gone, as if a malicious magician had pointed his magic wand at it and caused it to disappear. The most frustrating thing was that I felt utterly helpless. I’d made my fortune based on passion and determination and hours and hours of work, but none of this was going to get my money back. It felt like the whole series of events was completely out of my control. There was nothing I could do. It was as if I were drowning.
As I watched most of our family’s money wash away, I told Tay about our financial reversals. There wasn’t much I could say beyond that.
“I don’t know what’s going on, dear,” I said. “I don’t have any answers.”
When we got married, she promised to be with me for better or worse, for richer or poorer. Well, I had to tell her that we were definitely now poorer.
We still had one last financial resource left: the cash I had invested with this venture-capital group. But when I went to investigate reclaiming that emergency fund, I found out that even that money was gone, possibly through embezzlement. Despite our inquiries and an investigation into that partner, we have no clear answers about what happened to our money.
The only thing I knew—knew for sure—was that most of the money I had counted on to start a new life was gone.
As I said, so many former NFL players get into financial trouble after they retire, and I planned to be an exception. I wasn’t. In 2012, I’d been a wealthy man, financially ready and able to dive into a new life and prepared for all its risks and expenses. A year later, most of my worldly resources had been washed away and we didn’t have an income. Yes, we had our farm, and my money wasn’t completely wiped away. We still had enough in the bank to pay our basic bills and put food on the table. God had blessed us with our daily bread. But the cash we needed to begin to farm in earnest? That simply wasn’t there. We had no money for equipment, no money for labor. We didn’t even have the funds to buy seed. For the first time since college, we were struggling. It was as if I’d never played in the NFL, never signed those contracts.
I’d been a good servant, hadn’t I? We lived on the most beautiful farm in North Carolina—a place that God had miraculously provided for us. We were doing our best to follow His new plan for our lives. We were serving Him. We were doing His bidding.