Many only knew Dave Brandt as a viral meme. In 2018, Reddit users shared a photo of the Ohio farmer with a caption in bold text — “It ain’t much but it’s honest work” — as if Brandt was humbly extolling the virtues of a day’s work in the field.

Brandt never said those words, but they seemed to match his folksy demeanor in the photo: a farmer in a plaid shirt and denim overalls, standing in front of rows of crops, head tilted with an earnest smile. A viral hit was born.

But Brandt’s moment of internet fame hid — as many memes do — the storied background of its subject. Brandt, a farmer and Vietnam War veteran, had won acclaim long before becoming a meme for pioneering techniques to preserve farmland threatened by soil degradation. The photo that vaulted him to fame was taken in 2012 by the U.S. Agriculture Department, which launched a national education campaign on soil preservation from Brandt’s family farm.

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Farmers and meme-makers alike came together to pay tribute over the weekend after Brandt, 76, died Saturday evening after suffering a heart attack during a car accident on Thursday, his son Jay told The Washington Post. Friends and family remembered Brandt for a towering legacy in American agriculture and a warm personality that somehow matched the viral version of him that had spread across the internet.

“I think he needs to be remembered as kind of the OG or the godfather of the whole soil health movement,” said David Kleinschmidt, an agricultural consultant and a friend of Brandt’s.

Brandt grew up in Carroll, Ohio, a small village southeast of Columbus. He left his family farm when he was drafted into the Marine Corps in the late 1960s and served during the Vietnam War, where he loaded tank shells as part of an armored battalion, Jay said. Brandt was wounded during his service and received a Purple Heart, Jay added.

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Jay said his father didn’t share much about his time in the military. Brandt, big and gregarious with hands “like big old bear paws,” instead threw himself back into farming, Jay and Kleinschmidt said. Forced to sell his family farm after the death of his father, Brandt became a tenant farmer tasked with the challenge of growing crops on a hilly stretch of farmland where the soil was sloped and vulnerable to erosion.

A mentorship program encouraged Brandt to experiment with methods to improve the soil. He avoided tilling his farmland and planted different cover crops to enrich his soil, taking note of how they performed. Brandt soon joined a like-minded community of farmers who were trying similar “no-till” strategies. He shared his growing knowledge in animated conversations at industry conferences, lectures and, in later years, YouTube videos.

“He was just so open to anybody,” Kleinschmidt said. “He would answer any phone calls, even if he didn’t know the phone number, just because somebody might need his help.”

The USDA took notice, too, starting a soil education program from Brandt’s farm in 2012 to spread awareness about soil conservation techniques. That collaboration sowed the seeds for his stardom as a meme. The photo of Brandt that went viral was taken during a video shoot that year, when the USDA interviewed him about his work.

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Kleinschmidt remembered scrolling past the meme on Facebook when it started to circulate. He was angry at first, as if the meme was mocking his friend’s work. But then he laughed — it felt like something Brandt would say, he thought.

“It grew on me pretty quick,” Kleinschmidt said, chuckling.

Jay said that when he broke the news to his father that he was an internet sensation, Brandt was similarly amused.

“I think the placement of it was, we felt, very harmless and nothing to be offended about, for sure,” Jay said. “We truly appreciated the style and feeling that it gave.”

Brandt’s humility belied the far-reaching impact of his work, Jay and Kleinschmidt said. He founded a nonprofit organization, Soil Health Academy, in 2018 that offers lessons and workshops in regenerative agriculture. Brandt’s teachings spread far beyond Ohio: No-till on the Plains, a Kansas nonprofit organization, made Brandt the inaugural recipient of a legacy award named after him in 2022.

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Farmers from across the country reached out to the family after Brandt’s death, Jay said, some who had only met Brandt for a matter of hours.

“You can only imagine the number of people that he has impacted,” Jay said. “… It is truly humbling.”

A Reddit user on Monday also bid Brandt farewell by posting a meme of him alongside various deceased celebrities and figures from internet culture, including Carrie Fisher, Steve Irwin, the Mars Curiosity Rover and Harambe the gorilla.

Jay said he hoped those who only knew Brandt from his viral meme would remember him as a farmer who did what he loved — honest work, in other words. The image the meme conjured wasn’t too far from the truth.

“Dad never did all the speaking to make himself important,” Jay said. “It provided an opportunity for him to meet other people and to share his experience. That’s what was important for him.”

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