Lassos and Lightsabers

A Swashbuckling Raider of Rare Fruit Brings Us the Earliest Cherries in North America

[cue John Williams theme]

OK, he may not brandish a lasso or a lightsaber, but Steven Murray Jr. of Murray Family Farms does search the far reaches of the world to collect what is rare and nearly lost—preserving an ancient wisdom that flows through us all and binds the universe. We recently caught up with him to hear the stories behind this remarkable farm.

Feel The Cherries (and grapes and more) Running Through You

Murray Family Farms is known for unique, flavor-packed cherries and grape varieties, alongside a diverse range of rare berries. Their proprietary cherry, the OB-1—named after General Kenobi, if that wasn't obvious—is the earliest variety to ripen anywhere in North America. A few weeks each spring, then gone until next year.

Keep an eye on the store for the latest, greatest cherries as the season unfolds. These are the cherries you’re looking for.

A Long Time Ago, in Bakersfield

The Murrays go back four generations on the farm—on Steven's mother’s side, in a line of matriarchal leadership that shaped everything that followed. His father, Steve Sr., worked through college on public assistance, grants, and scholarships, took a degree in Plant Science at UC Riverside, and spent years in state and county ag work before striking out on his own as a consultant. The plan was always to come back to the land. He met Vickie—who studied conservation and hospitality at the University of Idaho—and in 1983, they started beekeeping. S.M. Apiaries grew to three hundred hives and bankrolled the next jump. They traded their small Bakersfield house for twenty acres of table grapes in the country.

Then a knock came at the door—an offer to grow new varieties of cherries—and the farm's future was written. Steve Sr. had inherited an obsession from his own father: where most growers plant a single varietal by the acre, the two of them had planted fifty-two trees of fifty-two different varieties. Steve and Vickie began selling their produce from a tent off Highway 58, but real growth happened at the Santa Barbara Farmer’s Market, where their cherries earned them an LA Times feature. The roadside tent became a refrigerated trailer, and a young Steven Jr. started trading bags of cherries for whatever rare and unfamiliar fruits other vendors had brought to sell—a passion we’ll get back to later.

Trade Federation Red Tape

We had an illuminating chat about the costs associated with the rules and regulations around organic farming. The Murray farm includes fifty-two acres of organic plots. Because those acres are not contiguous, each plot requires separate organic certification. Certification runs $500 per site per year. It adds up quickly. And organic certification is just one layer. 

There are the USDA Good Agricultural Practices audit fees. To sell at farmer's markets, Murray works through a secondary agency—OC Certifiers—and, on top of that, answers to Agricultural Weights and Measures. All these costs can prevent farms from getting the organic label they rightly deserve.

Young Padawans Learn the Ways of the Farm

Another side of Murray Family Farms isn’t measured in acres or yield—it’s measured in kids. Roughly forty thousand a year walk through the gates of the 10,000-square-foot Big Red Barn, eat in the restaurant, wander the fields, and learn what a working farm actually looks like.

School groups come during the week, U-pick families on the weekends, and in October, a pumpkin festival turns the property into a full-on seasonal destination.

What visitors take home is a kind of knowledge that’s gone missing from a lot of childhoods. Many guests arrive at the farm and want to know where the strawberry trees are—an innocent and funny question, but a little alarming! It's why the educational program exists—allowing forty thousand kids a year to connect with how their food is actually grown. Bakersfield might be a bit of a trip from the Rootstock neighborhood, but we’re excited to bring a little of Murray to our communities.

The Last Crusade

Steven Jr.’s interest in fruit is slightly obsessive — and expands well beyond what you may be familiar with from a trip to your produce aisle.

Steven joined the California Rare Fruit Growers at ten years old, and they made him their scholarship recipient—money that would eventually help fund his years abroad. He enrolled in a language school in Mexico for nine months and wandered through the markets, where the unfamiliar shapes and the names of fruits he didn't have words for yet got under his skin for good. Italian came next, then two years of French, a summer in Montreal. His classmates turned out to be Brazilian, so he learned Portuguese. He spent three months at the YMCA in Wakayama for Japanese, then picked up Mandarin from his Chinese classmates and ended up living in China for three years—helped along by that same Rare Fruit Growers scholarship—finishing his last college divisions in Chinese.

Now, he’s been to 125 countries to hunt down rare and exotic fruits like the goat nipple berry, twenty-seven varieties of Elaeagnus, and Che Fruit, a small berry that tastes like watermelon and leaves an almond-like reminiscence in its seeds.

What stitches all his adventures together is rare fruit. He’ll tell you that these plants need to survive because we don’t yet know what their uses could be for humanity. When he’s asked what keeps him going on the hard days, the answer is plain. He really likes fruit.

[and CUT!]