Hello!

We’re Steven and Christine Bailey, and we're people-gatherers. That means we really miss last night’s dinner guest at the breakfast table the next morning. We believe something beautiful happens when people share meals around the table.

"Kindred" means "tribe" or "family." On Kindred Farm, our 17 acres in Santa Fe, Tennessee, we raise vibrant produce, flowers, and honeybees using regenerative farming practices that give back to the soil, heal the land, and nourish our bodies. We’re passionate about cultivating community, sharing meals at long farm tables under the stars, and enjoying the bounty of this beautiful land we're grateful to steward.  Those who've gathered around our table are a huge part of this story.

We hope Kindred Farm is a place where you feel peace, simplicity and a greater connection to the land and each other.

Christine Bailey
Co-Founder, Farmer, Marketing Gal

Christine Bailey is a grateful farmer, author, podcaster, wife, and mom, Of all the things Christine ever thought she'd be, a farmer was never one of them. But to her surprise, she's found her true self while digging her hands into the soil of Kindred Farm. Christine is the host of the weekly podcast, The Kindred Life, and author of The Kindred Life: Stories and Recipes to Cultivate a Life of Organic Connection (HarperCollins). She also home educates two wild and free daughters will always say yes to waterfall-chasing, campfire-sitting, and eating ice cream on the roof under a country sky.

Christine grew up an Italian-American Jersey girl before leaving the northeast for college. She attended Belmont University in Nashville and worked in the Christian music industry for several years on tour promotions, new album releases, and films. After marrying Steven and moving to Dallas, she helped start an Africa relief non-profit called Mocha Club where for five years as Membership Director, she had the honor of learning from the African people, her colleagues, and the donors she was able to interact with everyday. In 2009, she and Steven started Urban Acres, an organic produce co-op, market, and urban farm. Christine has always wanted to return to Tennessee which feels like home, and she finally got her dream when she and her family moved back in 2015.

Emma Brenae
Director of Operations

Growing up in a large family of 7 siblings, Emma Brenae loved being outside in nature and sharing meals around the table with her family, making homemade breads and tortillas with a Mexican/Puerto Rican/Southern food influence: “I love trying new foods, but my comfort food is definitely Tex Mex and Mexican flavors. Those foods taste and feel like home to me.” Emma also grew up cooking for hundreds of people at camps with her family, so it’s no surprise at all that she fit in quickly here at Kindred! Her favorite thing about being on the team is the variety of things she gets to do everyday. As Director of Operations, Emma multi-tasks amazingly, handling details for everything from the prep kitchen, to events, to inventory, to farm work and basically anything else that keeps this place running smoothly!

In her spare time, Emma loves cutting and styling hair and would love to eventually open her own natural beauty salon.

Adriana Lisboa
Operations

After growing up in a family of 7 siblings in a rural area with animals and a garden, Adriana Lisboa is very at home working on a farm! Puerto Rican food with a Mexican influence was what her family often shared around the table. In her role in Operations, Adriana does everything from working in the prep kitchen, to planting produce and flowers, to taking photos and videos at events. She loves working outside and being surrounded by the flower fields, especially in springtime on the farm.

In her spare time, Adriana loves traveling, watercolor painting, photography, and videography. Her dream for the future is to travel to Austria and work as a travel destination content creator.

The Backstory

Our journey together began in Dallas, TX, where gathering people together around the table has been part of the DNA of our marriage since 2005. But our food choices at the time still revolved around "diet" and "low-fat" with fake sweeteners galore. A short time later, we bit into an organic apple for the first time and realized we had never truly tasted an apple before. We heard about things like kale and collard greens and discovered that beets could actually be incredibly tasty and completely unlike those magenta rubbery nuggets in steak house salad bars. This led to a huge awakening of learning how to feed our bodies real, unprocessed food and we became educated on the importance of produced raised without chemicals and humanely raised pastured animals.  

Shortly after seeing the documentary, Food, Inc. in 2009, we were inspired by farmer and author Joel Salatin of Polyface Farms in Virginia and began supporting the local farms movement. We began visiting local Texas farms and filling coolers in the back of our trusty Volkswagen Rabbit with raw milk, fresh-baked sourdough bread, organic berries, and sweet potatoes. Soon, other people wanted in on it! What began as 17 families quickly turned into our family business from 2009-2015: Urban Acres, an organic produce co-op that grew to over 2,300 families all over the Dallas/Ft. Worth metroplex. We also ran Urban Acres Farmstead, a 1/4 acre urban farm, market, and organic café where we sold local, artisan goods and hosted farm dinners and events for the community.

At the end of 2015, we sold our business, dismantled our lives of over a decade in urban Dallas and decided to move to middle Tennessee, just south of Nashville. We jammed our stuff in a POD and headed northeast down I-30 without a new job or home in sight, towards opportunity, possibility, rolling hills, and four seasons. Steven became connected to the local community when he accepted a role as Farm Director at Homestead Manor and director of the Thompson's Station Farmer's Market.

Then one day, we found land in breathtakingly beautiful Santa Fe, TN (it's pronounced “Santa Fee”), about 45 minutes south of Nashville and just off The Natchez Trace Parkway. We knew it was time to start our own farm, and this is where Kindred Farm began to take shape. The land was used for farming many generations ago in the World War II era, but nothing was growing for decades. We broke ground on the first day of spring 2017 and started from scratch.

We grow produce and flowers using regenerative farming practices using The Market Gardener method made famous by Jean-Martin Fortier of Les Jardins de la Grelinette, an internationally recognized 10-acre micro-farm in Quebec, Canada.

While we also raised heritage hogs and chickens at the beginning of our farming experience, we now know that our passion is gathering people on the farm for our events, dinners, and experiences, and growing beautiful produce and flowers that support pollinators and a healthy ecosystem. We especially love growing zinnias, cosmos, sunflowers, dahlias, heirloom tomatoes, garlic, onions, winter squash, greens, and Napa cabbage for our homemade Korean kimchi!

We've loved supporting local farmers with our voices and dollars for many years. But building our own farm is some of the most physically, emotionally challenging work we’ve ever done.

And we can’t wait to get out there again tomorrow.