Churn Butter: An Interview With Slowdown Farmstead
We live in a so-called “society” where technology is rampant and everything is getting faster. Amazon is racing packages to your front door by placing their drivers under heavy surveillance. TikTok is destroying what remains of an entire generation’s attention span. Food delivery has become more common than cooking in too many households. Amidst all this madness, one family has decided to go against the grain and consciously slow down.
Slowdown Farmstead is not only a popular Instagram account with over 71,000 followers, but a window into a lifestyle, and a beacon of light for those longing to return to a more traditional way of living. Tara, the creator and admin behind Slowdown Farmstead, describes herself as a farmer, nutritionist, and “hopelessly devoted mother and wife.” She advocates for food sovereignty, eating nose-to-tail, and churning butter as a spiritual practice.
Tara has become a teacher for her followers on Instagram and Substack that not only seek out her advice on how to butcher cows, eat organ meats, and use duck fat, but guidance on how to make a marriage work and grieving over a loved one. She stated in a recent podcast that many of the people flooding her DMs with questions on long-term relationships and navigating conflict are young people in their 20s and 30s. There is another way of life out there—a life centered on tradition, nutrition, and harmony with nature—a life that relies less on short-term pleasure and dopamine hits, and more on nourishing the soul through simple acts like churning butter, packing lunch for our loved ones, and making love to our husband or wife.
Tara spoke to Countere about what slowing down actually looks like, how to handle an animal that’s turned into your arch-nemesis, and whether returning to nature and starting a homestead is a panacea for everyone in these wild times.
Thanks for speaking to Countere, Tara. What does “slowing down” mean to you?
It means being able to be present in the moments that make a day that go on to make a life. It means enjoying leisure because I've earned it. And hard work makes leisure all the more luxurious. Slowing down means taking walks that turn into rambling bumbling saunters that are so slow that I can notice the glint of a pebble and the grooves of bark in a tree. It means there is room for imagination.
How long did it take you to slow down?
My whole life up until this very moment. And yes, I am still in the process, forever and always a work in process. If I ever think I've mastered anything, give me a cuff upside the head. Humility over ego, please.
When did you realize this way of life was what you wanted? Did your upbringing directly influence your current lifestyle?
I moved continuously as a child and then well into my adult years. But there was a time when we lived in the country, on a corner patch of my grandparent's wheat farm. My whole life, I ached to get back to the cicadas and cow manure and fresh-cut hay. Everything I experienced on that farm was stitched into my every cell. I could never fathom how it would be possible for me to find my own farm let alone be in a position to buy it. But, for years I volunteered on farms, I took books on farming out from the library while I lived in the middle of the city, and I drove to farmers to buy food, picking their brains about anything and everything I could. It's when I found my mentor, my dearest of all friends, that I actually began believing I actually might just do this farming thing.
What is something you look forward to every day?
Eating, wrapping myself around my husband, being outside in nature, learning something new.
How do you make your love with your husband last?
An absolute commitment to us over self. Nobody wants to hear that anymore. It's all "I am woman, worship me." No, I am a woman and he is a man, just two people of equal worth, different strengths, mingled talents. We are deeply in love and in the times when that feels like it's ebbing—and it does ebb and flow—commitment binds us together. We are something bigger than us as individuals. I am grateful to find the things I can offer him and that is reciprocated. I spend more time thinking about what kindness I can extend to him over what he didn't do right for me. And that, too, is reciprocated. We didn't grow up knowing this or come to our relationship knowing this. We had to figure that out through a lot of strife and confusion in our early years. Our relationship is the greatest treasure of my life and I must handle that with care. I want to handle that with care.
One tip on parenting?
You are not your children's friend. You are their leader, their protector, their devoted mama or papa. They have enough friends. Get comfortable with being unliked by them sometimes. They need to learn discipline in a healthy way so they can go into the world with self-discipline. There will be plenty of time to be friends when they're grown. Oh, that's the other thing—allow your children to grow! Adapt your parenting and encourage them to bloom. So many parents lay this mold on their grown kids, still treating them like they were 15 years old. I don't want to be known for my teen girl shenanigans and our daughters don't want to be either. Stop thinking you know everything about them and allow them to tell you who they are and who they are becoming.
What is a responsibility you have that may look mundane or ordinary from the outside looking in but for you it is a spiritual practice?
Making butter feels like a spiritual practice to me. We make butter in the traditional way, with a jar and wooden paddle, just like my ancestors did. But first, we must milk the cow. And before we can milk the cow, we must raise a fine young heifer calf the way we think it right to raise her. That means she is grown at her mama's side, nursing from her. Then, as she grows, she lives on pastures that nourish her. When she is big enough to have her own calf, then, we can milk her. That milk is a magical thing. Milk from grass, shared with a soft little calf.
It's a glorious thing, to see the separated cream, turning and sploshing in the glass butter churner. It requires muscle and determination. Around and around you turn the old wooden handle. And just when you think all hope is lost, the cream will never be anything but cream, small globules of deep yellow butter begin to form. One by one, they appear. Where did that dark yellow come from? How is it possible that it appeared out of nowhere? From there it is kneading and paddling and washing the butter, again and again.
It takes an incredibly long time. It's a lot of effort. But for something so wondrous, shouldn't it be?
How has this way of living enriched your relationship with God?
I have come to know death very intimately in my life, both through the living and dying cycles on a farm and through the death of our daughter. It's in that opening to death, rather than running from it, that life lives evermore vibrant and saturated. When I am still and silent, God speaks to me. There is life everlasting and overwhelming beauty in the smallest of things and the most ordinary of moments. I pray to receive those gifts every day. I pray to approach life with humility and openness, even when it is excruciating.
Do you believe everyone should live this way? Is homesteading “the answer”?
I veer as far away from "shoulds" when it comes to other people as I can. What I would say is that we need to get back to our local communities as much as possible. I was just talking to a rancher friend of mine the other day. He has thousands of acres and raises hundreds of cattle. He's a wonderful farmer. He was telling me that within his lifetime he has seen his community go from hiring their own doctors, school teachers, etc, to turning that all over to centralized governments. And we can all see how that's turning out. Within a few short decades, we have lost our communities in the march to globalization.
Even in a city we can have community. When we were in the city, my husband posted from military base to military base, we organized buying clubs for farm food of all sorts: raw milk, bulk meat, and even bulk organic tree-ripened fruit from the Niagara Peninsula (something I still do to this day). If you can raise your own food, do it. I think securing our food, especially in today's world, is more important than ever. If you can't, align yourselves with local food sources. Build relationships and you build resilience.
How do your children benefit from the way you live?
Well, they're in their 20s now, so they benefit by visiting and filling up their bags with free food! But before this time, when they were working on the farm with us, they learned many a virtue. They learned about what I call the "rightness" of things. I think that used to just be called "life lessons,” but there seems to be a wide array of "life lessons" in this topsy-turvy world. Our children learned that what is right is of more significance than their feelings. Feelings are important, but they are not the ultimate determiner of what is or isn't right. For that truth, we have to look to God and to the natural world which shows us order and place. Our daughters are grounded young women, aware that what is right is often challenging and beyond our comfort, and that's just the way it is. That is where growth lives. Oh, they're also hard physical workers which is seemingly ever more rare.
What is most nourishing about your way of life?
Living in union with the sacred. The parts that feel good and the parts that ask me to be more.
Have you ever had an animal that you didn’t like? A nemesis of yours that roamed your property? How did you handle this?
Yes, her name was Rosanna. She was the most physically perfect cow you ever did see. She had a deep body, a beautiful frame, and she was a wonderful grazer. Problem was that when she had her calf, she was the worst mother I have ever seen. She started beating him up immediately (that can happen with a first calf), but she never did warm to him. We had to bring her into the barn and tie her up just so her poor little neglected calf could nurse off of her. She would go wild every time he did. We worked with her for months before he was big enough to figure out that he could slip in between her two back legs and run along with her frantically nursing while she tried to run away. He got pooped on multiple times. The cherry on top was that Rosanna had the most heinous "moo" I have ever had to endure. I love a good moo, cow moos are music to my ears. Rosanna's moo sounded like an elephant in heat. And it never ceased. On and on she would go. With every moo my nerves frayed a little more.
Happily, when harvest time came, Rosanna was delicious all the same.
Did you always see yourself as a mom and having this much responsibility? Did you have other career aspirations that you set aside to live this way?
I never saw myself as a mom until I was one at 21. That wasn't the plan, but it was the greatest gift of my life that set me on a course I am so grateful to call my life. There are still things I got to do—a stint in the army when I was young that turned my life around, a gig as a photojournalist, a private practice as a nutritionist. But this is me, most of all: the farming, the dirt, the animal poop, the nurturing of life, and the facing of death. Being a mom has been the most meaningful thing in my life, right along with being a wife. And here I am, with my babies all gone, reporting back to all the young parents, "They weren't kidding when they say it all goes so fast."
What is an all-time favorite recipe of yours?
I will share a recipe I got from an old, dear friend that she got from another old, dear friend. It's for custard. Why custard? Because it's so beautiful and comforting and adaptable. Eat it plain or put some stewed fruit on it. Make it with raw milk or make it with sublime beestings (the first milking of colostrum). Just don't ask me if you can make it with soy milk because I will cry.
Kathleen's Beautiful Custard
2 egg yolks (duck eggs if you have them)
3 eggs
1/4-1/2 cup honey (depending on your sweet tooth quotient)
1/4 tsp salt
3 cups very hot raw milk (beestings if you can—even if it's once in a lifetime)
1 tsp ground vanilla bean (or 1.5 tsp vanilla extract)
Nutmeg
Preheat oven to 325 °F. Butter 1 quart glass baking dish (or, what I do is butter a few smaller ramekins. How many? I don't know. Start with what you think would be a quart’s worth and butter a few more if you need to.) Heat up the milk slowly in a pot. While that's happening, stir the eggs and yolks together until just blended and stir in the honey and salt. If you're using ground vanilla, you can add that in now as well. Slowly trickle in the hot milk when it's ready, stirring constantly. Add the vanilla extract now if that's what you're using.
Pour the mixture into your ramekins or glass baking dish; put the ramekins or baking dish into a second, larger baking pan that has been filled with an inch or two of water. Sprinkle the top of each custard with nutmeg. Put the larger pan, filled with the smaller ramekins or baking dish, in the oven and bake for 30-45 minutes. If your ramekins are smaller, you will need less time. Check that they are set by inserting a knife in the middle. It should come out clean. Take them out and let set. They're good cold or warm, eater's choice.
You can adapt this recipe endlessly using coffee, pouring some maple syrup in the bottom of the ramekins, adding bits and bobs you think would be tasty. Can't go wrong, really. And if you do, just drink it—it still tastes divine.
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