Homegrown Wealth

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by Robert Burke
Virginia Business
June 2004

He never said he was a real farmer. All those years that Bill Meadows dressed in bib overalls and a straw hat and helped customers load their cars with plants and produce, he never once claimed he grew it all himself. But it didn’t hurt sales that people thought he did. “In business being creative can get you where you want to go,” he says.

Where Meadows - who goes by the nickname Farmer - has gotten is a long way from where he started. Born and raised in West Virginia, he met his future wife, Betty, when they were just kids. The two were married at 18 and had a happy life – she was a librarian, he was a teacher and football coach – until Farmer discovered he could make a few extra dollars in the summer by selling tomatoes at a roadside stand.

Over the next few decades came more roadside stands and a string of discount nurseries scattered around the fast-growing Northern Virginia suburbs. Today the business he and Betty built, Meadows Farms, has 22 nurseries that last year brought in about $43 million in revenue.

A lot of the couple’s wealth is in the land value of the nursery properties, which underscores what’s happened in the Northern Virginia real estate market. In the late 1970s, for example, the Meadows bought 13 acres in western Fairfax County for $300,000. When plans to build a new shopping mall nearby were revealed soon after, the couple sold the land for $3 million.

Nowadays the Meadows let their son, Jay, 42, run the family business. They’ve got a 7,000-square-foot house next to the water at Fawn Lake, a gated community near Fredericksburg. Last year Betty gave her husband a Rolls Royce convertible for their 50th anniversary, and they recently traded it in for a bigger hardtop model. For fun they go out for dinner, a lot, spend time with friends and vacation in places like Cancun, Mexico, or Jamaica.

Despite the money there’s no pretense from these two. They seem more like a couple of lottery winners. One day recently they pulled the Rolls into the parking lot of one of those buffet-style restaurants where they planned to have dinner and were immediately surrounded by curious onlookers. Farmer climbed out, swung open the double-doors on the side and showed off the 16-speaker stereo. He answered questions. One woman wanted a hug. He loves the attention the Rolls gets. “It’s just a fun thing to have,” he says.

The couple remembers, though, the years when they first launched their business and drove second-hand cars and lived in apartments instead of buying a house. They learned to keep close track of their money, he says, and invested it in the business instead of spending it on themselves.

They’ve put their story down on paper, in a self-published book that came out last year, titled “Nearly Perfect: An American Success Story.” It recounts their ups and downs, including the death in an auto accident in 1981 of their 18-year-old daughter, Cindy. That loss is part of why the couple decided to have more children – this time via surrogate mothers. A few years after their daughter’s death, Farmer fathered two more children through two surrogates. “He likes to tell people he’s had children by three women and is still married to the first one,” says Betty Meadows.

The two youngest children – Kate, 20, and Rocky, 19 – are both in college now, and so the couple is in full retirement mode. “We are so happy right now in what we’re doing that we plan to stay right here,” he says.