John Bragg started as a blueberry picker earning $4,000 a season, then bought land to farm. When prices collapsed, he built a freezing facility instead of giving up. His company now processes 70 million pounds of blueberries yearly and controls nearly half the world's supply.
Do the words John Bragg mean anything to you? No. Basically a farmer billionaire. His last year of high school, him and 4 or 5 other blueberry pickers end up making $4,000 each picking blueberries. He decides to start his own blueberry farm, so he buys a little piece of land and he starts trying to harvest blueberries. And it goes pretty well the first couple of years. He's doing all right. But a couple of years in, there was just huge supply glut, way too many blueberries, not enough buyers. Prices crashed. And so he's like, shit, I think I need to build a packaging and freezing plant. Borrows money from the bank. He gets money from the other farmers. He ends up building something called Oxford Frozen Foods, which today controls about 40 to 50% of the global supply of blueberries. 70 million pounds of blueberries they're making every year. And he's worth a billion dollars. He built the largest fruit farm basically in, in the world.
