An hour drive south of Nashville, down backroads and a dirt road, sits a big white barn.
One Saturday morning a month, the doors of this barn open and the smell of fresh cinnamon rolls and morning dew mix together, inviting everyone into the farm store.
Music fills the air as little kids run around a long table that sits in the middle of the barn and a table off to the side is piled with homemade jams, granola and spices.
This barn is home to Kindred Farm, where Belmont University alumni Christine Bailey and her husband Steven cultivate community through dinners, cooking classes and the farm store.
Originally from New Jersey and majoring in music business at Belmont, Christine never saw herself living on a farm or having the lifestyle she does now.
But when she met her future husband at a conference in Branson, Missouri and moved to Dallas, her passions started to change.
“Honestly, it started with us watching the documentary Food Inc. in 2008. It was kind of the beginning of the local food movement, and we were so inspired by this documentary,” she said.
The first question they asked themselves after watching this documentary was: “How can we start supporting local Texas farmers?”
The couple would wake up on Saturday mornings, hop in their Volkswagen Rabbit and drive to farms all around Dallas to pick up local meat, cheese, bread, produce and fresh treats.
“We lived in the concrete jungle there and I missed being out in nature. So, for like a couple hours on a Saturday, we would escape that, exhale and it lit a fire in us to keep doing that,” said Christine. “We started bringing goods back for our friends and having brunches with them at our house and we always loved gathering and cooking with friends.”
These brunches turned into an accidental “organic produce co-op" in a parking lot, which then turned into a business called Urban Acres.
Urban Acres teamed up with around 2,300 families to support all types of local farmers and grew into an organic cafe, a market with native Texas products, a quarter acre farmstead, bee hives, bunnies and a whole lot of love.
“So many things we do here at Kindred Farm, we started there. Our cinnamon rolls, our granola, our artisan pizza, and then even our first farm dinners. All of this started in an urban setting and we just kind of learned as we went. We learned from the farmers that we worked with and were inspired by them,” said Christine.
At the end of 2015, doors started to close in Dallas, and they began to look for land in middle Tennessee to start a farm of their own.
“We sold everything. We sold our business, we sold our house, we had our two small children, and we packed everything up and drove to Tennessee,” she said.
While scrolling on Zillow one day, the land they now live on in Sante Fe, Tennesse popped up.
The 17 acres had even ground for farming, rolling hills, woods and even a move-in-ready farmhouse built in 1949, picture perfect for the goals the couple had.
Dec. 2016 was their first winter in Sante Fe, and they had no idea what spring was going to bring.
“That early spring, we saw like all the kind of trees we had and the flowers and perennial plants that were here. The first day of spring in 2017, we plowed this whole field,” Christine said as she pointed to the field in front of the barn.
Once they built the greenhouses and barns, everything else came together and took off better than they could have imagined.
Kindred Farms has become so popular because of the experiences they offer to guests that walk through those big barn doors.
“We want to connect with people, and we want people to connect with each other. So, we actually started doing classes back at Urban Acres, our Dallas business, and they were some of the most popular things we did,” she said.
These classes ranged from beginner knife skills to making kombucha.
The farm dinners also originated in Dallas, and the Baileys knew that they wanted to incorporate and grow those community activities in their own space.
“To be able to integrate our flower fields and our own produce and the products we make into our classes and dinners is just like the ultimate for us. And to bring all of that together finally, is just a culmination of what we've been doing for a really long time,” Christine said.
Another type of event they started is dinner demos where guests can come and watch her husband Steven, who is a private chef, make dinner and learn from his expertise.
Don't worry, there's opportunities to taste test, too.
The Baileys opened the farm to bring people together and Christine was inspired to share their story through a book and podcast.
Her book, titled “The Kindred Life: Stories and Recipes to Cultivate a Life of Organic Connection” was published in 2022 and has brought people from all over the country to the farm.
“What I tried to write about is that the kindred life is something that anyone can live wherever they are. It’s a life of connection no matter where you are. Connection to community, connection to life around the table, and connection to the land, and I experienced that right in the middle of a city,” said Christine.
One of her daughters comes out of swinging doors from the kitchen where her dad is cooking up breakfast. She calls numbers and serves the visitors waiting for their most important meal of the day.
As her kids have gotten older, they have embraced the farm as a family business.
“They work and have significant tasks they get to help with here, that they want to do. It’s really neat to see their personalities develop and their giftings develop and like what they each love to do,” said Christine.
A couple sits a few chairs away, chatting about how amazing the cinnamon rolls and breakfast burritos were.
Jonna and Mark Dancer also graduated from Belmont and have known Bailey since her college days.
"This is one of those things where people in their late 20s or early 30s say ‘hey, I’m going to build this thing and it’s going to be huge and we’re going to do all these events,’ and all their friends go ‘sure you are.’ But they’ve done it,” said Mark Dancer. “It’s taken a lot of time, a lot of effort, but it’s really becoming something impressive and worth the drive out here.”
Nowadays, it seems like farms have to have some sort of agrotourism in order to survive.
“It’s really hard in our current society for someone to survive selling produce at the farmer's market. People aren’t used to paying the prices that it takes to grow something organically. But social media has brought so many new opportunities for farmers. They can do online education. They can do subscription-based services now,” said Christine.
It helps if farmers have a business background and can run their farm like a real business because it diversifies what they can do, she said.
People wander in and out of the barn, peek inside the greenhouses and enjoy the fresh country air.
Christine Bailey welcomes each person in with a warm smile.
“That’s what kindred means to us, and that’s why we chose that name for our farm, because we wanted it to be a place where people could feel that feeling of being family and known even if it’s just for a few hours,” she said.
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This article was written by Bree Fabbie
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