Basketball Player Gives Up Career To Farm Sweet Potatoes For The Needy

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Many would call it a leap of faith cum service to humanity, while others see it as plain stupidity for former NFL Star Jason Brown to give up his career for a dream, but he is convinced it was the right thing to do. The 31-year-old NFL Star, who was once ranked one of the best players in the league and consequently offered a $35 million contract to play for the St. Louis Rams, gave all up to start a farm near his home in North Carolina, growing sweet potatoes and distributing the crop among the poor. Read more from CBS.

When Brown first decided to make the move back to his home county of Louisburg, his agent told him that he was making the biggest mistake of his life. But he was convinced that this was the right thing to do. “I looked right back at him and I said, ‘No, I’m not. No, I’m not,’” Brown said.

“God revealed to me that he had something greater in store for me and that my family should move back to my home state of North Carolina and start a farm,” Brown wrote on his website. “This really caught us by surprise because we knew nothing about farming. Yet, out of obedience, we started looking for available farmland.”

Despite never have done farming work a day in his life, Brown ended up buying a 1,000-acre property. He and his wife Tay named it ‘Fruits First Farm’, making a promise that his people would receive the first fruits of whatever is produced from the land.

He then watched a ton of tutorials on YouTube, got a bunch of advice from local farmers, and started cultivating sweet potatoes and cucumbers on his plot. He put in years of work to restore the land to arable condition, and recently gave away his first successful crop – 100,000 pounds of sweet potatoes. “When you see them pop out of the ground, man, it’s the most beautiful thing you could ever see,” he said.