When Jason Brown speaks to schoolchildren, they clamor to hear about his seven-year NFL career. A mountain of a man who stood six-three and weighed 330lbs in his prime, he excelled at center – gridiron speak for the innermost lineman who initiates offensive plays by “snapping” the ball between his legs to the quarterback.
Brown entered the draft in 2005 after standout years at the University of North Carolina. He quickly gained a reputation for being a human plow who relentlessly cleared pathways for some of the game’s best. He got paid well for it, signing a $20m free-agent contract with the St Louis Rams in 2009. At 26, he was the position’s highest paid player in the league, and he bought the toys to show it: the MTV Cribs-style house, the flashy cars to match.
But none of it filled the terrible hole ripped through him after his older brother, Lunsford, a US army intelligence officer, was killed in September 2003. A mortar round hit Lunsford’s encampment outside Baghdad.
“I began comparing everything I had accomplished in my life with Lunsford,” Brown said. “But there was no comparison. He lived a life of service and sacrifice. And I was living what everyone said was the American dream. But I didn’t feel like it.”
A devout Christian, Brown asked God for direction and, one day, heard a voice – that of the legendary radio broadcaster Paul Harvey. Specifically, he heard Harvey’s monologue, So God Made a Farmer, which had been famously adapted for a Super Bowl car commercial. “So God made a farmer out of Jason Brown,” Brown said. Never mind that he didn’t know an ass from a hand hoe.
Brown is part of a small but growing cadre of current or former professional athletes who have taken up agriculture. Some see it as a rainy-day or retirement activity after years of physical exertion catch up with their bodies. Others view it as a business opportunity. And some use it to connect with family and rural backgrounds. Many of them are Black Americans.
Take Trent Brown, a Cincinnati Bengals player who grew up with a farmer grandfather who raised livestock. He now tends 90 head of Brangus cattle. Mike and Maurkice Pouncey, twin brothers who became venerated NFL linemen, are dude ranch farmers who breed show horses for kicks. The former NBA star Blake Griffin is ushering in a new era of sports farmers-investors, joining with 19 athletes from other major sports to start a $5m fund to purchase farmland in Iowa. The former quarterback Jake Plummer was raised in rural Idaho by a “very holistic” mother who prepared blue corn waffles with tofu for breakfast, recommended echinacea for colds and put comfrey poultices on sprains. Now age 49 and retired, he co-owns a mushroom farm outside Denver. “When NFL fans hear me talking about taking lion’s mane for cognition and reishi to relax and cordyceps for energy with no crash, they perk up,” he said.
YouTube as farm school
In a class all by himself is Brown, who says he is on a mission from God to feed the hungry. Rather than sign with another team after his market-setting Rams contract ended after the 2011 season, Brown walked away from the game at age 29 and plunked down $4m for a lush 1,000-acre tract that resembled land he saw in a dream. The property became First Fruits Farms, a faith-based “agriministry” in Louisburg, North Carolina, outside Raleigh.
Brown estimates that First Fruits Farms has harvested and donated more than 1.5m pounds of food – most of it in the form of blueberries, sweet potatoes and other perennials – to food banks, soup kitchens and community pantries.
“I’m working harder now than ever – the hours are much longer and the life expectancy is no better [than playing football],” Brown said. “But what I’m doing right now is the most rewarding thing I’ve ever done in my life.”
Though it was important for Brown to pursue this work after his brother’s death, he didn’t have the first clue of how to get started. He borrowed an ancient tractor and culled the basics of farming from YouTube videos.
Not long after moving to the farm with his family, Brown realized that the bank he had trusted to grow his NFL money had been asleep at the wheel. His considerable nest egg had dwindled to almost nothing. His other investments tanked, too. “So many former NFL players get into financial trouble when they retire,” Brown wrote in his 2021 autobiography, Centered. “I had planned to be the exception. I wasn’t.”
The situation left Brown feeling exhausted and cornered. He turned to food for comfort, and before he knew it, he tipped the scales at over 400lbs. Brown seriously considered quitting farming. But as his efforts eventually reached the press and the public took note of his perseverance, help started pouring in to plow land and seed crops. His farm was added to a gleaning network – essentially, a group of volunteers who’d harvest his yield for free. One person gave him a brand-new tractor on the condition that Brown keep giving food away. The kindness of those strangers – sent by God’s grace, Brown says – is the only way he made it through that period of hardship.
His struggles with weight and self-doubt have made Brown determined to keep fighting for good health and accessible quality food for all. He’s critical of a domestic farming industry that favors textiles, biofuels and cash crops over growing things people can eat. He knows that quality food is medicine. He eats fewer carbs and processed food. He’s once again starting his day lifting weights at the gym. “Even though I have an active lifestyle, nothing can take the place of actual exercise,” he shared.
Some of his eight children are also converting their chores into business endeavors. “One of my middle sons, he manages a flock of more than 100 laying hens,” Brown said. “He takes his eggs to the farmer’s market every Friday morning. My oldest son has been a certified beekeeper since he was eight years old; next year, he’s gonna be marketing his honey [under the name] King’s Royal Honey. My daughter takes a lot of our wildflowers and herbs and infuses them into homemade candle waxes. It’s awesome.”
The Gold Mamba who loves homegrown grain
Family connections led the WNBA star Jewell Loyd on her own unexpected farming journey. The Seattle Storm guard, who won Olympic gold with Team USA at the Paris Olympics and got her Gold Mamba nickname from Kobe Bryant himself, grew up in the north Chicago suburbs without a clue about agriculture, like Brown.
That was until her brother, Jarryd, a scrappy college hooper who played professionally overseas, married into a family that owned a farm just outside Minneapolis. The property was primarily run by Jarryd’s grandfather-in-law but had become tougher to manage as his relative advanced in age.
“So we ended up buying it to keep it in the family,” said Loyd, whose basketball salary and endorsement portfolio – though meager compared to her male counterparts – is still a nice chunk of change. “There’s not a lot of women farmers, not a lot of Black farmers either. A lot of our land has been taken and sold from us. Jarryd and I thought this would be a great way for his family, his kids, to have something later in life – but also for our family to have, to start generational wealth. It was important for us to have land.”
Black farmers like Loyd and Brown make up less than 2% of all US farmers. Decades of persistent racial discrimination and violence stymied access to land, loans and federal funding. Since the 1920s, Black farmers have been forced to give up land and income that would be worth about $326bn, according to the American Bar Association – enough to buy all four major sports leagues and, perhaps, all their teams too.
“Think of what has been actually lost,” said Jason Brown of First Fruits Farm. “What I do as a farmer does not just affect myself and my family. It affects my entire community, markets in urban communities that were supplied by Black farmers. It’s impossible to put a number on the effects” of this historic and ongoing dispossession.
Knowing some of that history influenced the Loyd siblings to preserve the family farm set amid a few of Minnesota’s 10,000 lakes, in a town called South Haven. Jarryd oversees the 160-acre farm as a hands-on manager, rotating organic wheat, corn and soy.
Jewell helps out when her busy basketball schedule allows. Even when she’s not physically present, there’s so much to stay on top of, she said: “the weather, the soil base”. She thinks about how easily things could change with a particularly bad winter or if a chicken farm or chemical factory springs up in their midst.
Loyd quickly learned that even the slightest change in environment can affect the farm’s produce, and farming has made her particular about quality. “Eggs are a big thing now,” she said, as they continue to command high prices in grocery stores nationwide. “I can’t just eat anybody’s. I go overseas to play and see everyone eating bread, but we’re not eating the same bread. Being a wheat farmer, I appreciate the quality of wheat you have to have for bread. So I make my own. I’m pretty … I wouldn’t say ‘bougie’ in that aspect, but I understand the difference now.”
From pigskin to poultry farmer
For the football star Von Miller, owner-operator of a burgeoning organic chicken empire, farming has been a complete game-changer.
Apart from raising backyard birds in Desoto, Texas, Miller didn’t know much about chicken farming. “I grew up outdoors hunting and fishing, but not on a farm,” said the Buffalo Bills linebacker. “My mom and dad were in the backup power systems business. Never in a million years did 12-year-old Von think that 35-year-old Von would be a chicken farmer.”
While in college at Texas A&M University, Miller’s talent for terrorizing quarterbacks and short-circuiting offenses marked him as a future Sunday star. Most everyone on the Lubbock, Texas, campus knew this except for Morgan Farnell, a professor in the school’s department of poultry science. “I’m not a sports fan,” he said, chuckling. “Just watching it on TV seems boring to me.”
In spring 2010, Miller, then a sophomore, enrolled in Farnell’s junior-level poultry meat production course, in hopes of scoring an easy A. He wasn’t going to get that from Farnell, who often caught Miller sleeping in his class.
Frustrated, the professor called a meeting with Miller and Texas A&M academic counselor Troy Kema, the three large men cramming into Farnell’s tiny campus office. “I hope you make it to the league and buy me a steak dinner or whatever one day,” Farnell told Miller. “But you’re here to get an education. If you hurt your knee or blow out a hip or something, you’re finished.”
“That was just divine intervention,” Miller recalled. “Of all my other classes, that was probably the most boring one. But Dr Farnell, for whatever reason, was determined to hold my interest.”
After the come-to-Jesus talk, Miller stayed awake and kept a perfect attendance record. He later switched his major to poultry science with the goal of becoming a chicken farmer himself. He waited until he signed his second NFL contract in 2018 – a six-year agreement for $120m – to partner with the farmer Cameron Molberg to launch Greener Pastures, a 35-acre farm outside Austin, Texas. “I thought I could write one check,” Miller said. “But it takes a lot of capital, and you’ve got to keep feeding this monster to get it to profitability. That was something I didn’t understand back then, but I understand it now.”
The venture produces non-GMO, certified organic broilers that, according to Miller, get to roam and reside in air-conditioned coops. “Our birds live a country-club lifestyle,” Miller said. “They only have one bad day, and that’s at the very end. And they don’t even see that coming.” One wonders if the birds would frame it as gently.
In April, Miller cut the ribbon on a 20,000-sq-ft US Department of Agriculture-certified organic poultry processing facility in Texas – no mean feat. According to a recent survey by the National Chicken Council, there were just 180 processing plants for broiler chickens nationwide. Many who work there and on the farm went to Texas A&M. “I went back to see it, and it’s really sharp,” said Farnell, who is staggered that Miller gives him credit for all this.
Greener Pastures supplies birds to retailers like Central Market, a tony Texas grocery chain that offers wine and culinary classes. “The dream is to go national,” said Miller, setting his sights high as he approaches the end of his playing career. Eventually, he hopes to open another chicken farm in the Dallas area and expand into producing eggs, beef and pork.
While he’s got his eyes on his future and his entrepreneurial ventures, he doesn’t think too much about being a Black farmer or a Black farmer-athlete, though both are rare. “I just had a vision,” he said, opining that “everyone” loves chicken. “I’m just glad I stuck with it to be able to have the operation that we have now.”
Jason Brown’s vision is a bit grander. He wants those same kids who marvel at his athletic career to get into the farming game.
In August, Brown hosted a summit at the farm to encourage Black teens who may be skeptical about farming to consider agricultural careers. Even though the average American kid has a less than 1% chance of making it as a pro athlete, they’ll often take those long odds over a career in farming – an endeavor that, for many Black children and city dwellers in general, can seem as far-fetched as a trip to outer space.
Brown wants to reverse that disconnect. “I’m trying to show the youth that farming isn’t just a viable career path for success,” he said. “It’s a purpose-filled life. Even if you get into it just to learn life skills that can feed your family, it’s worth taking a closer look.”
