MANTI -- His NFL teammates thought Jason Buck was crazy when he took up a life of farming and ranching after retiring from professional football. Why not live off his football past? Why not a life of ease with his millions?
They didn't understand. That is precisely what he wanted to avoid, which is why he is here on this summer morning, forking hay to his cattle and getting ready for another full day of work. An irrigation pipe needs fixing. A cow needs doctoring. A four-wheeler is broken down in the field. Crops need checking. A tractor wants repairing."The work never ends," he says. "There's always something."
Buck, wearing boots, jeans and a cap that says "BEEF It's What You Want", reaches into the corral to stroke the head of a large black bull, who snorts and lunges at the fence. "He's never been this snotty before," says Buck, climbing over the fence to challenge this affront. They eye each other a moment across the corral. They appear to have a healthy respect for one another. The bull weighs about as much as an entire offensive line, and Buck is a towering 6-foot-6, 260-pound former defensive end for the Cincinnati Bengals and Washington Redskins. Buck cautiously approaches the Bull and strokes his head. An uneasy peace is made.
Later, bouncing over rough roads in his Ford pickup, Buck surveys the fields of lush, green grass that he has hewn out of the sage and weeds just west of Manti. Off in the distance the spray of the giant pivot irrigation sprinklers is backlit by the morning sun. A Mormon temple watches over the valley from the eastern hillside, and beyond that are the mountains.
"My dad told me about this place," he says, as a jackrabbit leaps in front of the truck and bounds up the road. "I drove down here and saw the mountains and the temple up there and thought 'This is heaven. This is where I want to raise my family.' "
It has been five years since he played for the Redskins, 13 years since he won the Outland Trophy at BYU as the nation's top lineman, and some two decades since his bleak days as an Idaho farm boy driven for a better life by poverty and heartbreak.
"I just grew up on a farm and enjoyed the life," he says. "I thought it was a good way to raise a family. I didn't want my kids to grow up around too much of a life of ease and convenience and wealth. So I chose farming. It's a hard life. But the kids are doing fantastic. They're straight A students, and they're involved in sports and activities. I did this for my children more than anything else."
He could have done other, more lucrative things. With his rags-to-NFL-riches-and-Super-Bowls story, he was urged to join a speaker's bureau. A favorite of the Washington, D.C., media in his playing days, he was also encouraged to seek work in TV broadcasting. Instead, he bought 650 acres, leased another 450 acres and went to work with his hands.
"It was a big sacrifice for me and my wife," he says. "There were NFL guys I knew and other friends who said, 'Are you crazy? You want to farm? Live a life of ease.' I gave up a more lucrative career just so I could be with the kids. We were willing to give up the easier life. We wanted to build character. The greatest legacy I'll leave behind is not my football career and the Super Bowls. It will be my kids."
Buck and his wife Roxi, his high school sweetheart, have four children -- Britteny 13, Jason 11, Haylee 7, Joshua 5. Roxi does not quite share his enthusiasm for farming -- "I hate cows," she says -- but she and their children help with herding and other farm chores. When Buck cleared land, the entire family was out in the field carrying off rocks.
"They're kids," says Buck. "They complain a little. But that's why I bring 'em down. One day Roxi left me with all four kids, and I had 150 head of calves to work with. I had the kids down here herding, giving shots, branding, castrating. The blood was flying. We were here from 8 to 8. They did great."
During Buck's NFL career, his family spent the off-season in a well-to-do neighborhood in Orem, but Buck wanted a rural life for his family after football. "The girls in our old neighborhood were wallflowers," he says. "You know what my daughter and her friends were doing the other day? They were running along the canal bank catching frogs!
"Here, I want to show you something," says Buck. He stops the truck and climbs out. He walks to the top of a small knoll that overlooks his green pastures and the valley below.
"I love this view," he says. "It gives me a sense of accomplishment. See that?" he says, pointing to acres of sage. "That's what those green fields looked like."
The farm was run down from years of neglect when Buck bought the place five years ago. The fields were overrun with weeds and sage. Fences were down. Trash and debris were everywhere. The soil was in poor shape. Buck bought the property in the summer of 1994, thinking he would have another year or two of football while his father managed the place. But the Redskins fired their coach, and the NFL adopted the salary cap that year, and no team would sign him. His father, unhappy with his new surroundings, also returned to Idaho. Buck was now a full-time rancher, faced with the daunting task of rebuilding the ranch on his own. He had to repair miles of fences, install a new irrigation system, build roads and dikes, level fields, scrape off sage, kill weeds, repair old drains, till and test the soil, fertilize it accordingly, plant seed.
Buck still manages to coach. He works with the high school football team at 3:30 and his son's little league team at 5. But immediately after practice, he returns to the ranch. During the haying seasons -- there are four of them, lasting two weeks apiece -- he will be out in the fields as late as 3 or 4 in the morning, swathing and baling hay.
"I've gone 48 hours without sleep to get everything done," he says. "When the work's on, you've got to do it."
Buck also has invested more than just his time. He grossed about $3 million during his seven years in the NFL, and virtually all of his money has been sunk into the ranch. It cost him $250,000 just to buy equipment -- tractors, a baler, stacker, swather, plow, combine, etc. It cost him another $250,000 for the computerized sprinkling system.
"It doesn't take long to eat up your football money," he says. "When I bought this place, it was in real tough shape. The first couple of years I laid out a lot of capital. This is the first productive year. The first three years were all losses."
Buck is taking on the farming business with the same intensity and dedication he used to make himself into an All-American football player. He isn't content to farm as his father did before him. Buck has enrolled himself in his own curriculum of modern farm studies. He calls Utah State University's extension services for advice on the latest farming techniques. He calls the state agricultural department. He subscribes to Grass Farmer Magazine. He orders books on soil fertility and grasses. He calls seed companies in Oregon, Illinois, Georgia, Oklahoma and Minnesota for advice.
"I want to have the best ranch in the state," he says. "I don't see why you'd want to do anything unless you want to be the best."
As a result of his studies, Buck is reversing field, so to speak, and changing his entire farming operation. Instead of harvesting hay to sell to other farmers to feed to their livestock, he will have cows harvest it for him. He will divide his ranch into eight pastures and rotate cattle from pasture to pasture every three days.
"It's called intensive grazing management," says Buck. "You don't need the expensive equipment. The swather and baler are cows -- and the bales go back into the field. That means less artificial fertilizer in the ground. It's a technique that's used in Europe, New Zealand and Australia. The more I studied, and the more I read and talked to people, I de-cided this is where the industry is going."
Buck had 370 head of cattle last year, but he has less than half that now while he develops and prepares fields of new grass for his new strategy. Each spring he will buy steers weighing about 500 pounds and sell them in the fall at 850 pounds.
"This is my newest field," he says, stopping the truck and pointing to a new crop of tender young grass. "It's a mix of rye grasses."
Buck is trying other new farming techniques as well. He was the first in the valley to use the pivot irrigation system, with the large sprinklers mounted on self-propelled wheels. He also is trying different types of grasses that will be more suitable for intensive grazing. While other farms use native grasses or fescues, he has planted various rye grasses such as BG 34 and Crown Blend as well as Baridana Orchard Grass and Regard Brome grass.
"You've got to have grasses that can withstand intensive grazing be-cause you put so many animals on it," he explains. "It's got to recover fast enough."
Field reps from a farming co-op told Buck there are only a couple of ranchers in the state who approach the job as aggressively as he does, and it's already paying off. Where many farmers get only $40 for a ton of hay, Buck's hay sells for $90 be-cause of its quality.
"Jason is doing things no one thought would work," says Russell Faatz, a local rancher who helps Buck work his place. "He's done a lot of things no one's done here before. Nobody thought pivots would work here. They're working. He's using all these new grasses, and they never thought they'd work. He's surprised a lot of people. They thought he was just a football player with a lot of money."
"I know what was being said around town," says Buck. "They were waiting for the pro football player to come in here and fail. It was the coffee-shop talk. There were plenty of naysayers."
Buck is used to naysayers and bucking the odds with hard work and sweat. He dreamed big while growing up dirt poor in a family of eight children. His father went bankrupt and lost the family farm. His parents divorced. The family slept for a time under a hay truck. Eventually, they tore the boards off an abandoned railroad station and fashioned an A-frame, open at both ends, to house the family until they could afford to rent a house.
Buck endured taunts from other children throughout his school years for his poverty and his dress, which consisted of a pair of jeans and a couple of T-shirts for an entire school year. He vowed that he would play pro football and buy a farm. He had to work in a feed store for two years just to scrape enough money together and add 60 pounds of muscle to attend Ricks College and try out for the football team. He went on to play in two Super Bowls, then financed a farm for his father and bought a farm for himself.
"It meant a lot to me to get the farm back," says Buck. "It's part of my heritage."
Buck has staked out his future. He will do speaking engagements to supplement his income. He will build a house on two acres he has set aside on the farm (the family is living in town for now). He will build a fish pond. He will develop more pastures. He will raise great herds of cattle.
"I love the work," he says, standing with his hands on his hips as his eyes sweep the fields, the herds of cattle and stacks of golden hay.