Meet Your Farmers

We are Kyle, Mel and our very helpful 3 year old daughter Rosemary Blossom Burns.

It’s been almost ten crazy years of farming together, arguing over which seed varieties to grow, playing baseball with over-grown turnips, blaming each other for forgetting to harvest the chard for market and dancing to Dolly Parton in the propagation tunnel together.

Mel was born and raised on the outskirts of Chico deep in nut country. While working on her BA in studio art she got a job at California Organic Flowers. During her three years there she fell in love with all the blood, sweat(so, so much sweat), tears and absolute beauty of organic farming. You can find her in the flower fields, baking treats for the crew with Rosemary, crafting wheat weavings, wreaths and herbal medicine.

Kyle grew up in the Sierra Nevada Foothills of Magalia and was homeschooled by his mother who he loved helping with in their big family garden. He started dabbling in agriculture classes, volunteering at market farms and growing ambitious backyard gardens while dreaming of farming. We met, started growing tomatoes together, fell in love and literally sold every thing we owned to start our first farm together at the Nye Ranch(read more about our farm journey here). We ran that market garden for 5 years before realizing we wanted to be closer to home. Kyle is the farm tomato king, garlic wizard & daikon whisperer.

To learn more about our farm journey watch the Farmers Friend video!

It’s been a wild ride moving farms twice while raising a toddler with no childcare during a pandemic. There were so many days where it seemed like the smart thing to do was give up the dream. Well, we’re either not smart or just stubborn as hell because we’re starting all over again with our most ambitious farm projects yet. Maybe we keep farming because we like drinking our coffee in the dark at 4:30am and watching the first rays of sun light shimmer in the dew drops on the mustard greens. Maybe we just love soil. And maybe we keep farming because of our passion for harboring community through good food, stewarding the land we grow on and working towards a more ecocentric future for our daughter and all the other children who are being left with an exponentially growing climate crisis.

Anyways, we can’t wait to feed y’all.