8 Celebrities Who Have Embraced the Farm Life
With public-facing careers that regularly land them in front of huge crowds on red carpets—and paparazzi chasing them down in their free time—the farm life understandably appeals to a number of A-listers as a tranquil, private retreat from the spotlight. Not to mention the allure of the scenery: Charming views of rolling hills, wide open pastures, and grazing animals instill an atmosphere of calm that is challenging to emulate in Hollywood or New York City. From Martha Stewart’s 150-acre New York estate to the California farm where Kelis cares for over 30 livestock, read on for all the details on celebrities who have set up a sanctuary in the countryside.
Photo: Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images for Once Upon A Farm1/8Jennifer Garner
The 13 Going On 30 star’s Oklahoma family farm has been in their possession since 1936. She’s called the Locust Grove property her “favorite place” and sometimes shares glimpses of the grounds with her fans and followers on TikTok, where she can be seen riding a tractor and harvesting a bounty of pumpkins from the fields. Garner is the cofounder of the organic baby food company Once Upon a Farm, launched in 2015. Per the brand’s website, recipes used in the line take inspiration from the flavors of the Alias actor’s farm.
Photo: James Devaney/GC Images/Getty Images2/8Gigi and Bella Hadid
The Hadid family’s Pennsylvania farmhouse served as their collective refuge over the pandemic, and as Gigi’s home base during her pregnancy in 2020. Matriarch and Real Housewives alumna Yolanda Hadid frequently shares dispatches from her life at the rural abode for her Instagram followers, which show her spending time with cows, horses, and ponies—as well as her two top model daughters, when they’re in town. The 32-acre property is in New Hope, about 30 miles north of Philadelphia.
Photo: Arthur Schatz/Getty Images3/8Martha Stewart
Martha Stewart’s 153-acre farm in Bedford, New York, dubbed Cantitoe Corners, offers plenty of home to work with for the iconic homemaker. While some might feel overwhelmed by such a sprawling property, Stewart seems to have found a state of bliss two hours north of the Big Apple in a life filled with gardens and animals to care for, including a stable of horses and five Sicilian donkeys. The plot is so large that she has room for an outbuilding simply to house her collection of baskets. On occasion, she’s opened her doors to those who wish to tour the grounds: “Every now and then I agree to a handful of private guided walks to show visitors what is happening in my gardens at the time and to share how we care for all the many plantings,” she wrote in a 2022 blog post. Sometimes Stewart welcomes more well-known guests to the country dwelling. This summer, Pete Davidson stopped by to see the place for himself. “Pete’s looking for a house in my neighborhood, so he came over to see my farm and understand what it was like to live in and around Bedford,” Stewart said.
Photo: Axelle/Bauer-Griffin/FilmMagic/Getty Images4/8Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick
Kevin Bacon bought the northwest Connecticut farm which he now shares with wife, Kyra Sedgwick, in 1983, purchasing the surrounding plots over the following years to add space and privacy. The pair are frequent costars in posts shared from the grounds, unpacking the many aspects of their farm life from the folksy Beyoncé covers performed for an audience of goats to updates on the ponies, alpacas, and horses who also call the property home. Bacon has said that the seller initially hesitated to grant him ownership over one particular structure on the property and later contractually required that the allegedly haunted edifice on the farm be destroyed within a month of purchase. “[The previous owner] said, ‘I can’t sell it to you because it’s haunted, and I’m afraid that you’ll get possessed and, you know, do some serious damage,’” Bacon told Rob Lowe on the latter’s podcast, Literally. The Footloose actor attempted to salvage a few treasures he had scouted inside the structure before it was torn down, but Sedgwick wasn’t having it. “I went up there and there were some beautiful old pine boards and a banister, and I said to Kyra, ‘We’ve gotta take those out.’ And she’s like, ‘No you’re not. You’re not putting those f—ing things in our house.’”
Photo: Lorne Thomson/Redferns/Getty Images5/8Kelis
“You become farm people quickly,” Kelis told Harper’s Bazaar in a 2021 interview. She and her family set up camp at the 24-acre Southern California property in January 2020. “None of my friends would’ve pegged me as a farm person, but I’m as farm as it gets at this point.” Two hours outside of Los Angeles, the “Milkshake” singer has gone all in on the farm life. She cans her own homegrown fruits and vegetables and cares for a herd of livestock on the property—over 30 animals, some of whom are named for stars, like Marvin Gaye and Whitney Houston. Still, the farm life comes with its own attendant struggles: “I came out here with a completely different idea of what was going to happen. I thought I was going to be cute. I really thought I was going to have cute farm things, and I was going to be cute. That is not the case.”
Photo: David Livingston/Getty Images6/8Pam Grier
The Jackie Brown star purchased an abandoned one-story brick ranch two hours south of Denver about 20 years ago. She fixed the space up and has added a few farm animals to the family: “I have two rescued horses and ride often to calm my nerves,” she told the WSJ. “My stutter fully disappears only while riding.” The farm life is in the actor’s blood, as her grandparents maintained a sugar beet farm in Wyoming: “I loved that place,” she says recalling childhood memories on the grounds. “One day, I went alone to the pasture and climbed a post fence to reach a huge draft horse. Big Horse could have killed me. Instead, he moved slowly and I fell asleep on his back. When Daddy Ray and my uncle came looking for me, I told them Big Horse and I were just napping.”
Photo: Jason Howard/Bauer-Griffin/Getty Images7/8Amanda Seyfried
“It’s insane how much I can feel so accomplished and successful here without having to be in a successful movie,” the Mean Girls actor says of her Catskills farm. She told The New York Times that at age 22 she started house hunting outside of Hollywood before finally landing on the upstate New York property where she now lives with her family and a crew of farm animals seven years ago. Her manager was apparently less than pleased about he A-lister’s decision to reside so far away from the starry LA scene, but Seyfried craved a different pace: “I was like, ‘No, Mark! I’m telling you, this is where I’m going to die.’” It was the right choice for the actor, who said that living the farm life has “solidified my need to be out of the game when I’m not working, to be in nature and to refresh.”
Photo: Bryan Firestone8/8Hilarie Burton Morgan and Jeffrey Dean Morgan
Since 2018, the One Tree Hill star and her husband, the Walking Dead actor Jeffrey Dean Morgan, have lived on a 100-acre upstate New York farm with three Highland cattle, five miniature donkeys, two dogs, chickens, ducks, eight alpaca, and their two young children. In 2020, she gave AD the scoop on life at her country retreat—which is known as Mischief Farm—and shared plans to paint the walls a rather unorthodox hue for a farmhouse, one that felt more aligned with her personal style: “I will be painting all of the walls that have taken a beating from my children,” Burton Morgan said. “I get picked on for being witchy, but I’m painting them black—I’m still a Goth girl at heart.” Her time at the abode inspired the actor to become an author, starting with her 2021 New York Times bestseller, The Rural Diaries: Love, Livestock, and Big Life Lessons Down on Mischief Farm, which she recently followed up with a second tome, a memoir entitled Grimoire Girl.
