About Us
Hi there friends!
We’re Kat and Ryan. A hard-working duo that cultivate local farm fresh flowers and food at KR Farms. Our 1/4 acre farm is located in East Bakersfield and is home to our family of chickens, dogs, cats, a handful of bee hives, birds and other pollinators a plenty.
Follow our journey on our newest adventures @KR-Farms
Our Story
Meet the Farmers
Not sure we can call ourselves farmers, and we doubt we will ever feel we have earned the title. We are a hard-working team that are passionate about growing food and flowers!
Ryan is originally from Michigan. He is a Captain for the City of Bakersfield Fire Department and was formerly a band teacher at North High. He loves being outside tending to his bees, climbing mountains, and biking.
Kat works in HR for a heavy civil contractor and covers the Central CA region. She has been in HR going on 10 years and when she’s not hard at work, she can be found outside running, hiking, working in the yard, and hanging out with the farm animals.
The Farm
It began Spring 2018 with a few raised beds and a small area of flowers. Shortly thereafter, Ryan surprised Kat with a flow hive for her birthday and it took off from there. Within the first two years we were growing hops, putting in more raised beds, beekeeping, designing a chicken coop, attending no-till grower workshops, and ripping out our grass for lasagna beds. You could say that we were “bit by the farming bug” and found ourselves blissfully in love with farming. We love growing local food and flowers, learning from others, and sharing our successes and failures on this grand adventure. Our goal is to create local goodness and share the happiness one veggie and flower at a time!
A few of our favorite things
Vegetables
We grow a variety of vegetables year round. We don’t grow for quick production crops, rather we grow what we love to eat and what we would like to try. There are always new interesting vegetables growing on the farm alongside our farm favorites.
Flowers
The first items to be planted on our lot were Dahlias. Since then our love for flowers has sparked to a variety of glorious blooms including tulips, narcissus, poppies, zinnias, anenomes, ranunculus, amaranth, celosia, roses, sunflowers, and so much more!
Bees
What started as a birthday gift for Kat, has since become a passion for Farmer Ryan. As bee enthusiasts, we understand the important role bees play in our food production and are proud to be bee keepers. Today we have 12 hives on our little plot and look forward to expanding our apiary in the coming years.
Soil
We know that good food starts with healthy soil. Healthy soil is full of organic matter, beneficial organisms and natural plant nutrients. That’s why we use natural methods and ingredients when it comes to growing. We make a majority of our soil amendments and compost on-site. We do not use chemicals, herbicides, pesticides or synthetic fertilizers on our farm. Instead, we use no-till techniques, compost tea, biochar, mushroom compost mulch and cover crops to aid in nutrient rich soil.
Chickens
After being gifted two hens we did a little research and decided we couldn’t get enough of their fun loving personalities and the benefits they provide to our farming operations. Hens play a key role in the success of our farm by controlling pests and acting as natural composter’s. They produce high-nitrogen manure which goes into our compost and in turn becomes our soil. Today we have 15 hens that produce gorgeous eggs far superior in both nutritional value and taste than store bought eggs.
Fruit
We have 28+ fruit trees on our little lot, not to mention several varieties of berries and grapes. We grow apples, bananas, peaches, apricots, pears, figs, grapes, nectarines, dragon fruit, olives, lemons, cherries, mandarin oranges, raspberries, blackberries, boysenberries, elderberries and gogi berries. We use our fruit in our jams, jellies, marmalades and our home brewed beer!