Derby Acres, CA

Derby Acres is a small Kern County CDP on State Route 33 at the northern end of the Midway-Sunset Oil Field, roughly five miles southeast of McKittrick and north-northwest of Fellows. The place was founded in the 1930s, and its map is mostly the working landscape of the west side of the San Joaquin Valley: highway, oil leases, dry foothills, and scattered homes. The oil field stretches south through Midway Valley toward Taft and Maricopa, making Derby Acres a named community at the field's northern edge.

That industrial geography is still active. In 2026, the state reviewed a Berry Petroleum proposal for two new oil and gas production wells about a mile east of Derby Acres; the project sits on State Route 33 and within the Midway-Sunset field. Residents' practical reference points are the highway and nearby oil infrastructure, with Fellows, McKittrick, and Taft forming the surrounding service map. Derby Acres reads as a tiny oil-field community whose name marks the northern edge of one of Kern County's long-running production landscapes.