I kind of solved it:
<small>
<?php
$key_1_value = get_post_meta( get_the_ID(), 'description', true );
$key_1_value = strip_tags($key_1_value);
echo substr($key_1_value, 0, 130); // pull only x amount of characters from the content
?>… </small>
If I use “get_post_meta”, it works just fine. The issue seems to be with using the_field() for some reason.