The Farm
Full Keel Farm is a small, family farm owned by Julia & Earl Keel. Our farm developed out of our love for growing, decades working in & around agriculture, and our desire to build a small farm at our home in north central Florida. We met working at a research station on a large Florida cattle ranch, where we started growing vegetables together in a small garden. Over the next several years, we planted more and more vegetables, often while dreaming about scaling up our hobby growing and having our own small farm. In the spring of 2017, we added two 50-ft beds of cosmos and zinnias into our vegetable garden, and quickly decided to transition to growing flowers.
Today grow cut flowers on a 20-acre parcel of farmland in north central Florida. We began farming on our original 2.5-acre property in 2019, and in 2023 significantly expanded our acreage and production opportunities with the purchase of an adjacent 17.5-acre property that our original parcel was once a part of.
We are a small family farm, focused on growing high-quality cut flowers for florists who value the quality and environmental footprint of local product. We have embraced the complexities of growing flowers in a warm, humid climate, and enjoy the challenge of adapting production methods to the Florida climate.
About Julia
Julia is equally passionate about farming and teaching and balances many different roles at the farm.
Julia’s love of agriculture began with two summer jobs on New England Farms, where she spent summers working from 2001-2007. It eventually led her to Florida, where she studied plant-soil interactions in grazing lands at Buck Island Ranch and completed a M.S. in Soil & Water Science. Julia is passionate about formal and informal teaching; she has presented at national conferences, lectured on grassland ecosystem services, mentored research interns, co-instructed an undergraduate course on the ecology of invasive species at the University of Florida, and been an invited speaker at flower workshops and seminars on the topic of warm climate flower production.
Full Keel Farm 