If the Detroit Pistons announce a new official fruit sponsor of the team, you know where to look– Isaiah Stewart
For those uninitiated, there’s more to Detroit Pistons big man Isaiah Stewart than just his physical nature in the paint or his penchant for settling disputes on the court. For Stewart, there’s the basketball side to the longtime Pistons enforcer, but there’s also an off-the-court side to Beef Stew that, coincidentally, revolves around food.
Duncan Robinson found out about the latter during an organized team activity out in California last offseason.
“We were out there, we did like a little thing this summer as a team,” Robinson said on the Old Man and the Three podcast. “It was really my first time meeting the team, we were out in San Diego. We were spending a little time, and Stew had his truck out there. He was pulling up in his truck. He’s got a big rig. A big rig for a big dude, and I was like, oh, he must live out here.”
That’s when Robinson found out that Stewart, his new teammate, is also a burgeoning agricultural specialist when he’s not boxing out seven-footers to grab rebounds in the paint during the NBA season. To be more specific, Stewart runs a massive farm out in the Golden State where he naturally grows a fruit that thrives in the sunny environment.
In particular, dates are the citrus of choice for Stewart. Not apricots, not oranges. Dates.
That’s a decision that the sixth-year forward / center landed on out of happenstance, but it’s also one he’s stuck to throughout the long, arduous work of clearing the ground and planting thousands of date seeds across the property.
“It was more so just my desire to continue to want to get into farming,” Stewart said. “Then when you look at a crop like date and you see how far back dates go to biblical times and how it’s used today. It’s a very healthy food.”
At the moment, Stewart says he’s part of a nine-man operation that runs during the regular season and grows to 10 men when he’s available to chip in during the summer. Stewart’s team is primarily focused on the “planting” stage of the process, but Stewart has poured in hours of sweat equity himself to help lift the date project off the ground.
“When we’re out there in the offseason, I’m out in the field working, but during the season I have a property manager,” Stewart said. “We're deep. We’re loaded, and those guys work hard. They get stuff done.”
Currently, Stewart has some livestock on the property with peacocks and mini-sheep roaming around, but the rim-protecting ace mentioned that he’s also going to be adding some cattle to the mix soon.
“You made a promise to me,” Robinson said to Stewart. “I don’t know if you remember this, but you said when I have kids, in the summer that I can send them out with Uncle Stew for a couple months, get them right, work with their hands, learn to live off the Earth. So, I’m going to take you up on that.”
Stewart theorized that all the time he’s spent working on his farm during the offseason has translated to the court in one form or another, though he hasn’t found a specific correlation between tilling the field and shots blocked per game just yet.
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