Centered

by Jason Brown

  All of that made it an ideal first crop for First Fruits Farm. If I had any money. If I knew what I was doing. But I was determined to walk in faith. And everyone knows that any walk—in faith, in farming, in anything else—requires a first step.

  I called up my neighbor Len Wester, owner of one of the biggest farming operations in the area. He and his family have been working the land for nearly a hundred years now, and every year he farms several thousand acres, making it one of the region’s largest farms. He understands the North Carolina soil, and how to work it, better than anyone I know. He also had heard much of my story—how this stupid ex–football player wanted to be a farmer and grow food for the poor. If anyone could help me figure out those first steps toward a successful sweet-potato crop, it’d be Len.

  “Hey, Len, I need some help,” I said over the phone. “I’d like to grow five acres of sweet potatoes. You know that hill on the backside of my farm? I’d like to plant them in the field there. But—well, I don’t know anything about sweet potatoes.”

  “Well, you know what, Jason?” Len said. “I don’t know anything about sweet potatoes either.”

  Before I had a chance to be too disappointed, Len added, “But I have some buddies out east, and they grow thousands of acres of sweet potatoes. That’s what they do. Let me ask them if they’d be willing to help.”

  Those buddies were David and Allen Rose, who run another huge farming operation near Nashville, North Carolina. The farm, J. B. Rose and Son, sprawls over thousands of acres, and the brothers typically grow not just sweet potatoes but cotton and soybeans and cucumbers as well.

  I didn’t tell Len about my financial problems. I still didn’t know how I was going to be able to afford to plant anything. But remember, God told me to walk in faith. This was the next step in that walk: learning how to actually plant and grow what I wanted. And in the meantime, I prayed—prayed that God would open some unexpected door, some window, some keyhole. That God would somehow facilitate what He had called me to do.

  About a month after that initial call, Len called me back.

  “Hey, Jason, let’s go look at that field of yours,” he said. “The field up on the hill where you wanted to plant those sweet potatoes.”

  So I went. And there I saw a miracle.

  The field, from one side to the other, all five acres, had already been dug, prepped, and rowed. The ground was covered in ripples of earth: rows of raised hills about six or eight inches high, running all the way to the trees beyond, separated by furrows where the water collects and irrigates the crops.

  All along the tops of those rows—those ripples of land undulating over the field—I saw small sprouts of green. The sweet-potato slips were already in the ground.

  I was shocked. I had asked for advice, not a fully planted field full of sweet potatoes. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t even know what it meant. I was grateful, but I was worried too. Had I miscommunicated with Len? Did he think that I had asked him to plant this field for me and I was now on the hook for what it cost?

  “Man, what’s going on?” I said when I found my voice.

  “Well, me and my guys, we had the afternoon off,” Len told me, talking about some of his farmhands. “I just figured we could come over here and knock this out for you.”

  “Well, that’s great, Len,” I said cautiously. Len is a super guy, but he’s a savvy farmer too. He knows that time is money. To “knock out” a five-acre field cost him plenty. And on an operation like his, it’d be unusual for him and his employees to have an afternoon to kill. “But how much did all this cost?”

  “Well,” Len began, “usually, sweet-potato slips run about $1,000 an acre.”

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. This was just like what you worry about with a car mechanic, fixing a whole bunch of stuff that you never authorized. I was looking at five acres of planted sweet potatoes. That’s $5,000 worth of transplants. I didn’t have $5,000 to give him. I didn’t even have $500. I had put my faith in God that He would somehow give me the means to afford a crop this year—maybe not enough to cover all five acres I’d set aside, but something. Something to show that I was serious about farming, that I was serious about following God’s call. And now, after all my financial setbacks, after all the stumbling blocks I’d suffered the past few months, here looked like another: a field of sweet potatoes I couldn’t pay for.

  “Um, Len, I really wish you had told me that,” I said.

  “No, no,” Len said with a smile. “Don’t worry about it. David and Allen—you know, the Rose brothers I told you about—I talked to them about you. They know what you’re trying to do here. They know that you’re trying to grow and give food to the needy. Their hearts were so touched by what you’re doing that they donated all this.

  “Jason, they gave you all these transplants.”

  I couldn’t believe it. Thank You, God, I prayed silently.

  “But what about you, Len?” I said. The Rose brothers might’ve donated the slips, but Len and his crew did the work. From experience, I knew it couldn’t have been easy.

  “You know what?” he said. “We’ll figure it out later. We’ll work it out sometime.”

  That was more than six years ago. I’m still trying to figure out what “work it out” means. I’ve never gotten a bill. I’ve never gotten an invoice. He never mentioned it again.

  Len died February 29, 2020, as I was writing this book.

  His obituary reminds people what a great man he was in the community, what a loving husband and father and grandfather he was. It says that he loved racing Matchbox cars with his grandkids and that he was an enthusiastic poker player.

  The obituary doesn’t mention how Len Wester helped a new neighbor when that neighbor needed help the most. It doesn’t say that if it hadn’t been for Len’s kindness and generosity, there might not have been a First Fruits Farm.

  A Career That Demands Faith

  I don’t know how you could be a farmer and not have faith. Everything we do is an act of faith—a statement of belief.

  Yes, a lot of that faith is built on knowledge and preparation. Before we ever put the seeds in the ground, we’re making sure the soil’s just right and amending it as necessary. We look at long-term weather forecasts to try to help us determine what we should plant, when, and how much. We work hard to eliminate unnecessary variables to give our crops the best opportunity to grow and flourish.

  Every seed we plant is still almost a little prayer. When we put it in the ground, it’s a way of saying, I believe. I believe that you’ll grow. That you’ll be fruitful. We hope that God will take these seeds and help transform them into something beautiful and useful.

  We all have a bit of that sort of faith that comes with farming. Even atheists have faith in things they can’t see but only hope for. We have faith that the sun will come up. We have faith that gravity will keep working. Think about the cycle of the seasons. Even when we’re sweating in July or freezing in February, we know that the weather will change someday. We know, even on the coldest day of winter, that spring is bound to come.

  Sometimes it doesn’t feel like that. It can seem as if the winter will never end—that we’ll be dealing with the cold indefinitely. Some people even suffer from seasonal depression, despite logically knowing winter won’t last forever. But the cold weather and lack of sun throws off their emotional equilibrium. The cold seeps inside them.

  We farmers boldly fight that pessimism in faith. We have to. Many of us start planting seeds when it’s still winter, when the cold wind blows over the barren fields and there might still be frost on the ground. Every day that we tend to our crops, tend to our livestock, we’re doing so in faith—that all our work will lead to a bountiful harvest. We don’t have any guarantees of anything, but none of us ever goes out there, plants a crop, and says, “Well, I
might get something this year, or I might not,” not really knowing or caring what’ll happen. You’ve got to have faith that your hard work will pay off and that God is with you.

  Farming, more than any other profession I know of, gives us a front-row seat for what it looks like to walk in faith every day and what the harvest of that faith can be.

  Growing and Giving

  All that year, I worked in faith. I tended my five acres of sweet potatoes, watching my YouTube videos and asking other farmers, like Len, for advice when I needed to. I weeded and watered my crops. I tended to them and checked on their progress, digging a few out every now and then to see how they were growing. My borrowed tractor kept chugging away. Everything was working just as it should—just as I thought it would. Unlike with my finances, I did have some control over what was growing on my farm. Thanks to Len and the Rose brothers, and due to some hard work on my part, we were actually going to have a sweet-potato crop this year. And for this first year, we were planning to give it all away.

  As I started doing some research, I dug up a new problem. I discovered that one acre of sweet potatoes can yield about twenty thousand pounds. Our five-acre field? If we had a good harvest, that’s one hundred thousand pounds. That’s a lot of food going to charity—food enough to feed thousands. Praise God, right? But as the potatoes kept growing and the harvest drew closer, I looked around to see what sort of labor we had to harvest all that produce. There was me, of course, and my wife, and…well, that was about it. JW was nearly seven by then, but I didn’t think we could count on him for much hard labor. Three-year-old Naomi could carry a sweet potato or two. Maybe. And we weren’t about to ask Noah, who was less than two years old, to work the fields for us.

  The staff of our farm consisted of just me and my family. That’s it. Sure, I knew many people. I still had contact with some of my old football buddies. But they were in the middle of the season. I didn’t want to ask anybody to give up all their free time to come down to the farm—to work and sweat and get dirty, just to give all the literal fruits of their labor away. I didn’t know what I was going to do.

  So, again, I turned to God.

  “God, thanks for the blessings You’ve given us. But like Jesus said in the Bible, ‘The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few.’ ”

  Don’t worry about it, Jason. Don’t worry.

  “But, God—”

  It’s just like Field of Dreams. You plant it, and they will come. I’m going to make sure you have all the help you need. Walk in faith.

  “All right, God,” I said. “I don’t know what or who’s going to come, but I’ll leave it in Your hands.” So I kept working.

  Two weeks later, I received a call from Rebecca Page, the Triangle gleaning coordinator for the Society of St. Andrew.

  I didn’t know anything about the society at the time. I’d never even heard of it. I only knew who it was named after: Andrew was the disciple who, among other things, told Jesus about the little boy with five loaves of bread and two fishes—food that would wind up feeding five thousand people.

  Rebecca quickly explained that the society was a network of people who glean, a term used regularly in the Bible. In Leviticus, Israelites are told to not pick clean the corners of the field or gather up the wheat and barley grain that falls to the ground (see 19:9) so that the poor would have something to eat too. Ruth was probably the Bible’s most famous gleaner. When the Moabite woman and her mother-in-law, Naomi, migrated to Israel completely destitute, Ruth gleaned the fields of a guy named Boaz. They eventually got married.

  Rebecca used the story of Naomi and Ruth as an illustration for what she and her network do. She told me that the society’s volunteers—the gleaners—would go out to farms after the main crops had been harvested and gather up the leftovers—the unmarketable fruits and vegetables left out in the field—and deliver them to food banks, church pantries, and soup kitchens. And while the society was (and is) a nationwide organization (more than twenty-three thousand people volunteered for the society in 2019), thousands of those volunteers lived around the Triangle area of North Carolina, within easy driving distance of First Fruits Farm.

  “We heard about your farm,” she went on. “We heard that you might have some gleaning opportunities there.”

  Her call came out of nowhere. I didn’t ask them for help. I didn’t know anything about the organization five minutes before. But it was, without a doubt, an answered prayer—a prayer answered just the way it needed to be. I was astounded. But now it was my turn to astound her.

  “God bless you,” I told Rebecca. “But here’s the thing: We’re not going to have any gleaning opportunities at First Fruits Farm. We’re going to have harvesting opportunities. You’re not just going to pick up the leftovers. You’re going to have the best. In fact, you’re going to have it all.”

  Rebecca was, indeed, astounded. The volunteers for St. Andrew rarely have an opportunity to truly harvest food. Most of the thirteen million pounds of produce they collect is stuff that no one else would want. To have an opportunity to work in a field ripe for harvest, filled with all the best produce a farm had to offer? It was a rare treat.

  More than six hundred volunteers took advantage of that rare treat on harvest day that fall. We needed every single one of them. God had blessed us with a bumper crop. I had expected 100,000 pounds of sweet potatoes, but instead we pulled more than 120,000 pounds out of that little five-acre field. I connected St. Andrew with Len Wester too. Volunteers gleaned Len’s fields and gathered up more than 10,000 pounds of cucumbers. The Society of St. Andrew distributed all that food to churches and food banks across the region.

  In our very first year, First Fruits Farm—thanks to help from Len, the Rose brothers, and hundreds and hundreds of volunteers—helped feed thousands of hungry families.

  You want to talk about faith that can move mountains? That day, I saw a mountain of sweet potatoes moved, all by faith. I knew I couldn’t accomplish that on my own. It was Jesus—the love of Jesus, and the earthbound body of Jesus, the people serving as His hands and feet—that made it possible.

  That’s what walking in faith can do.

  Sowing Seeds

  We still give away most of the food we grow. People sometimes ask how we can. And, honestly, sometimes I wonder how we can too. But every year, through God’s grace, we’ve been able to do so. We might not always be able to, but so far we have.

  How? There’s a one-word answer: God.

  Oh, if you look at our finances, you’ll see God at work in pragmatic ways. Tay uses her degree, working as a dentist a couple of days a week. That helps pay the bills. I’m frequently paid to speak at schools, churches, conventions, and the like. Although all that earlier financial turmoil wiped out most of our fortune, I still had a little of it left—enough to cover our expenses. And remember, we farm. The house is paid for. We grow most of our own food. Even now that we have eight children in the house, we’ll never grow hungry. Tay reminds me that even at our lowest moments here on the farm, we’ve never reached a point of true poverty, a daily reality for way too many American families.

  But sometimes God’s provision looks a lot like Len Wester’s help or the hundreds of faithful volunteers from the Society of St. Andrew who labored in love. They look a lot like miracles.

  In the Parable of the Sower (see Matthew 13), Jesus talks about the frustrations and rewards of farming—how seeds can fall on rocky soil or weeds, how they can be eaten by birds or die in topsoil that’s too shallow for them. But the seeds that land in good soil, Jesus says, can yield a tremendous amount of fruit—thirty or sixty or even a hundred times more food than was planted.

  Farmers count on a good rate of return. Experts say that when it comes to grain, you need to get at least three seeds back for every one you plant. That’s the minimum seed ratio to sustain life, because it gi
ves you two grains to eat for every one that you put away to plant for next year. With today’s modern farming techniques, the yield can be much greater. Some years, farmers are even blessed with harvests that outstripped their most optimistic expectations.

  In 2014, First Fruits Farm’s harvest extended well beyond a bumper crop of sweet potatoes. The farm was experiencing a hundredfold yield in blessings in other areas too—gifts beyond measure. The seeds we were planting were producing fruits we couldn’t even conceive of.

  A lot of that was because my story was getting out there. Writers and reporters had caught wind of this former professional football player who’d become a farmer and how he was giving food away to those who needed it. It was a weird story, a compelling story, a feel-good story that’d make readers and listeners and viewers feel better after sifting through all the real news, stories about bitter politics and disaster and scandal. It was the sort of news that would make folks feel a little better about the world around them—that some good was left in it still.

  We owed much of that interest to Tim Stevens, a sports reporter for North Carolina’s News & Observer. He had come out to the farm in 2013 and reported on First Fruits Farm and all my big plans for the place then, and he came out again to follow up, right during our incredible harvest in 2014.

  He took some pictures, wrote a nice little piece on the harvest, and guess what? That story went all around the world. Suddenly, First Fruits Farm became a coast-to-coast feel-good story, and national journalists started knocking on our farm door to talk with us. Our email was inundated with well wishes. We were getting thank-you notes in the mail. (We started getting plenty of unsolicited advice too: “Hey, here’s what you should really be growing on your farm,” they’d write.) It was all very gratifying.