"Soil Saved My Life": The Story Behind the Mad Farmer's Apprentice (Part 1)

Jun 13

8 min read

I met Jason Fullerton in a virtual writing workshop in the summer of 2025, but it wasn’t until I found his profile on Substack that I leaned in to learn his story. Here is the micro-sized snapshot his Substack profile offers of his life:

“Former evangelical-capitalist-colonizer, transformed by grace into a humanity honoring, community enmeshed, creation loving, dirt covered farmer. Sharing in poetic form what the Holy Spirit within knits together.”

After reading this, I was hooked—I had to know more.

So, graciously, Jason offered to meet with me via Zoom, where I learned more about this story over the course of two hour-long sessions spread over a couple weeks. I wish you could have been there. To listen to his story in his own words was fascinating.

But I hope in the words that follow to at least provide a compelling glimpse into his life—one of a brave Christ-follower and one that I believe will leave you encouraged, inspired, and hope-filled.

Upstate New York: A Dream in Seed

After hearing a call to “feed my sheep,” Jason switches from corporate work to food service, eventually uprooting his family and leaving behind everything they once knew.

Jason started his career in corporate offices. He and his wife, Rita, and their two young sons (now 10 and 8) were living in upstate New York, where Rita was from, near the upper Hudson valley. The work of his first job—monitoring revenue cycles in medical systems—helped Jason discover his ability to “take processes and have a deep understanding of them very quickly,” a gift that has served him well as a now-farmer.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

After a decade in corporate work—and after much success and the real potential to advance the corporate ladder—something resonated: “I looked around,” Jason shared, “and I was like, I am sitting in a box that’s inside another box of a room that’s in another giant box and almost all of these boxes have no windows . . . so I’m sitting in my coffin. I’m going to die here if I stay. And so, I was just like, that’s it for me. I’m done.”

After this, Jason and his wife, raised in the Assemblies of God tradition, decided to reignite their involvement in church. They were taken in by their local pastor, and Jason toyed with the idea of switching into ministry. But something nagged at him: “I felt this very clear, kind of the call of Peter that Jesus gives, where it’s just like ‘feed my sheep,’ ‘feed my lambs,’ and I didn’t understand . . . just like Peter didn’t.”

In fact, it was many years before Jason felt he truly understood this call. But he attempted to follow it, nonetheless.

Making the switch into food service seemed like the next logical step, and Jason was fortunate enough to find work alongside chefs who‘d been trained at the Culinary Institute of America, a top-ranked culinary arts school that just happened to be located within miles of their home. His training taught him how to cook things well; but more than that, he was learning how to love food, honor it, and appreciate it at a new level.

Still, something was missing. After two years, Jason felt this poignant plea: “I called you further.” Not fully understanding, yet willing to go, Jason gathered his wife, his boys, and his belongings, and just days before the world would shut down for COVID, they moved twenty hours away, arriving without a job, a home, or a clear plan in Central Texas.

Central Texas: Breaking Ground

In a search to discern God’s purpose for his life, Jason and his family end up on an overgrown property that he turns into a farm: “Here’s where you learn to feed my sheep.”

“We moved from New York,” Jason shared, “drove across the country to Texas, the week that everything shut down for COVID. We literally were driving, and the doors were shutting behind us.” This was also true metaphorically, as doors of opportunity began to close only days after Jason and his family arrived in Texas.

They were set to arrive on Saturday, and his first interview was scheduled for Monday—one of seven he had lined up with food service providers before they left New York. But one by one, the calls came: his interviews were canceled as businesses, stores, and restaurants were all forced to close.

So they arrived in Texas with all their stuff, another child on the way, and zero prospects for where Jason might work.

It would be four months before Jason finally landed a job back in food service. But, again, just before Christmas 2020, a moment of realization came: “This is not feeding people in the way that Jesus really speaks of . . . these people aren’t hungry . . . I need to figure something else out.”

So just before Easter 2021, he and his family moved again, this time from Dallas/Ft. Worth to Abilene. This was due in part to the pull to continue following God’s lead, but more unambiguously, the Fullertons had received notice three weeks before that their landlord planned to sell the house they were living in, so changing course suddenly became a necessity.

Once again, they found themselves in a new place without a clear plan of where they would live or how they would make ends meet; but Jason felt assured: “We’re going to take this on faith.”

Jason on one of his daily walks on the Texas farm. "I tried to listen to the earth, the air, and the Lord," he shared. "There was little to no sound pollution in our space in Texas."

And wouldn’t you know? A couple they met through their church community offers their home for a weekend, and COVID stipend checks come in right on time, and God seems to answer all their prayers in the nick of time, one day at a time, until they find themselves on a five-acre homestead just outside the city.

The owners of the home had raised their kids there, but had long since abandoned the property, offering to rent it to Jason and his family with the caveat that it needed some work. But to Jason, who was down to his last $3,000 and who had been AIRBNBing with his wife and three small children for weeks now, recognized the gift when it was offered.

A short time later, a moment came, while standing on an old patch of garden at this new home, when Jason heard audibly: “Here’s where you learn to feed the sheep.”

And wouldn’t you know—again? Just a short time later, someone from their church community called and needed a space for, you guessed it, sheep! Jason laughed while reminiscing on this moment: “I don’t know how much more literal you can be!”

But this season just outside of Abilene was about so much more than pasturing sheep. Here is where Jason first learned to be a farmer. He spent the rest of 2021 raiding the local library and attending “YouTube university,” learning everything he could about how to farm and how to grow food. He learned to become a “no till” farmer and became adept at using a broadfork (pictured below). He spent the winter and early months of 2022 breaking soil and opening beds, which was harder to do than it sounds given the clay-like, crusty state of the earth in those parts.

Jason with his broadfork, manually breaking up and aerating the compact soil.

Through it all, he learned not only to work in soil, but to feel his way to understanding soil. He spoke of the moment when subsoil “opens up” and begins to almost exhale and breathe. And in the opening of the potential for life beneath him, he created space for something new within him:

“I almost felt myself being opened up to breathe.”

“This isn’t about the sheep,” Jason shared, recalling a moment of intense clarity. “Am I literally supposed to feed people?” he had asked. And the response was clear: “Yes, I gave you the earth to turn out good fruit, not just in yourself spiritually, but physically.”

And so, leaning into the words resonating within his spirit, he bought 15,000 seeds that spring, broke up 5,000 square feet of soil, and without hesitation resolved: “I’m going for it.”

Northern Virginia: Tending and Tilling

After a turbulent first growing season, Jason finds his way back to his roots, in his hometown in Virginia. Here, he experiences some of his life’s hardest moments, but also, for the first time, real healing.

By the spring of 2022, with beans planted in the ground, Jason waited for the rains of March to give way to warmer temperatures. And warm up, things did. By April, the temperatures had climbed to 100-plus and relentlessly stayed there for forty-eight consecutive days. Turns out, it was the worst drought Abilene had experienced in thirty years.

In the midst of this, while working in 105-degree weather well before summer had even begun, reality struck: “I’m going to learn how to garden and farm in the most extreme circumstances.” And truthfully, this reality led to some doubts too, like rocks becoming visible while breaking up soil.

“Is this my pride?” Jason had asked, as he day-by-day reentered the inferno of his seemingly self-appointed new role. But despite the heat, despite the lack of rain, despite the extra effort it took to tend the ground in such extreme weather, he felt tugged.

“Go take care of it,” he heard within him. “It needs to be tended . . . you can’t sit down because things get hard.”

So tend he did. From March until the first frost in November.

Jason's space in Texas after the soil had been broken open and covered with compost.

Perhaps it doesn’t need saying that the physical work Jason was doing in the ground, the Lord was doing in his heart. Caring for the farm meant spending plenty of time alone, much of that in prayer. “He’s breaking open the fallow ground,” Jason realized. “The seed has to die before it can become . . . I’m living that experience right now.”

The fullness of this burial-death-resurrection journey came when Jason experienced what he described as a “blackout” at the end of 2022. The Lord’s work to break him down, one piercing blow at a time, culminated in him leaving Texas, leaving his family, and moving in, temporarily, with old family friends in Virginia.

Jason spent his days in Texas taking care of both the land and his family. Here, he's pictured with his sons and holding the hand of his toddling daughter, Abigail, who was born in Texas in 2020.

He was back home, but far from the same man who’d once left.

“I was in crisis,” Jason explained. “But where I come from, therapy was a bad word . . . I needed professional help.” And for the first time in his life, Jason sought a counselor, which he described as “massively helpful.” Together, they worked to heal old wounds that had long been buried.

Personal struggles, marital struggles, familial struggles—everything had resurfaced and, so it seemed, all at once. But his godmother encouraged him: “Don’t sit in the mire of this moment.” So Jason found ways to keep moving forward, restoring relationships that had been broken and ignored for years.

Eventually, Jason reunited with his family, and in his own words, they found a way to “establish new pathways in how [they] communicate with each other.”

What was broken, now redeemed.

The children would often accompany Jason on evening walks through the growing space "to observe and talk about what [he] was working on and what the earth and plants were up to."

But away from Texas and from the farm he had worked so hard to build, he realized: “I love my hands in the soil.” And so, wanting to continue that work, Jason started in earnest to search for farming jobs, open to moving to any part of the country that could afford him such an opportunity.

Specifically, though, Jason clung to the call to “feed my sheep.” He wanted a job that not only grows food, but that feeds hungry people.

God called, and God answered—in the form of the job Jason has now.