Murray Family Farms: U-Pick, the Big Red Barn and Kern County Agritourism

Bakersfield sits in the middle of some of the most productive farmland in the United States, and for most visitors that fact stays entirely abstract. Something glimpsed at 70mph from Highway 99. Murray Family Farms is where it stops being abstract.

It is ten minutes east of the city, off Highway 58 at exit 127, and it is the closest thing Kern County has to a farm you can simply walk into.

From 20 acres to 320

Steve Murray bought 20 acres near Bakersfield in 1989. The operation now runs to 320 acres.

The number that matters more than the acreage, though, is the variety count: roughly 700 fruit types, across more than 6,000 varieties. That is an unusual way to farm. Most Central Valley operations go the other way, enormous plantings of a small number of commercially optimal cultivars, harvested in a tight window and shipped.

Murray’s approach is the inverse, and it is what makes the place visitable. If you grow 700 things, something is always ripe. That is how a farm sustains a u-pick season that runs nearly year-round instead of for three weeks in June.

AI

Picking your own

U-pick runs most Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, across most of the year.

What is actually pickable rotates constantly (cherries, berries, peaches, plums, nectarines, and a long tail of things that only a farm growing 6,000 varieties would bother with). There is no fixed answer to “what can I pick”, and that is a feature, not a gap in the information: it depends entirely on the week.

Check before you drive out. The farm publishes what is picking, and the answer in mid-May bears no relation to the answer in mid-September.

The Big Red Barn and the Little Purple Barn

Not everyone wants to pick, and the farm is built with that in mind.

The Big Red Barn and the Little Purple Barn are fruit shops. You can walk into either and buy fruit and vegetables, homemade pies, pickled goods, jams, sauces and honey without setting foot in a field. For a lot of visitors, particularly anyone passing through Bakersfield with an hour to spare, that is the whole visit, and it is a perfectly good one.

Educational farm tours also run, separately from the u-pick operation.

October: the pumpkin patch

Then there is fall, when the farm turns into something else entirely.

Through October the site becomes The Great Bakersfield Pumpkin Patch, and more than 70,000 people come through it. From across the state, not just from Kern County. The draw is the pumpkins plus everything built around them: sunflower and corn mazes, hayrides, games and activities.

This is the busiest the farm gets, by a wide margin. If you want the quiet version of Murray Family Farms, October is not the month. If you have children and you want the loud version, October is the only month.

Fitting it into a Kern County trip

Murray Family Farms works best as a component rather than a destination, simply because of where it sits.

It is on the Highway 58 corridor heading east out of Bakersfield, which is the same road that carries you up to Tehachapi and the wind farms. A morning at the farm and an afternoon in the mountains is a well-shaped day, and the elevation change between the two is the most interesting thing about driving in this county.

Going the other way, it pairs with Hart Memorial Park and the Kern River corridor northeast of the city for a day that stays close to Bakersfield.

What it tells you about the county

Every guide to Kern County has to deal with the same fact: agriculture is the overwhelming economic and physical reality of the place, and it is almost entirely closed to visitors. You can drive past a hundred thousand acres of it and never stand in any.

A farm that sells you a bag and points you at a row is doing something genuinely unusual here. That is worth an hour of anyone’s trip.