Slow Farm

Slow Farm uses crops & critters to build topsoil and restore natural fertility from the microbes up!

10/05/2026

Icky was born premature with all the medical odds stacked against him. Just one look, and everyone knew Icky’s survival was an extreme long shot— except Icky.

Icky had no idea he was fragile, and because he’d never done anything, everything seemed possible. He woke up looking forward to the day and impatient with his tiny body’s limitations.

That sassy, stubborn curiosity is what got him through his rough beginnings as much as any of the meds.

Now he’s two and a half years old and such a handsome fellow, as you can see. He spends his days grazing with his closest friends, doing exactly what a happy, healthy pig is supposed to do. But if I’m there, he is still going to run over for a close up and snuggle. 😅

For everyone who has been rooting for Icky since those early days, this look back is for you. Thank you for helping Icky (and me!) through those difficult moments!

09/30/2026

Icky heard you needed this today. 🐷💛

09/26/2026

Pyrenees selective hearing at its finest. 😅🐾

09/24/2026

Pigs have a reputation for treating meals like a full-contact sport. With a couple of pigs and spaced-out bowls, dinner is no more intense than enthusiastic musical chairs. This is especially true of Kunekunes, who are naturally sweet, docile animals.

But as our Kune herd grew over the years, mealtime vibes shifted from polite kids’ birthday party to all-out frat kegger. Feedings became a blur of bodies, spilled grain, flipped pans (and occasionally a tipped-over farmer, lol). I kept seeing my pigs shove each other and eat mouthfuls of dirt just to get their share, acting in ways that didn't fit their gentle nature at all.

It would have been easy to blame the pigs and decide they were just being gluttonous. But farming is mostly just the practice of paying attention, and after a lot of watching, I realized the issue wasn’t bad manners. It was anatomy and mechanics.

Kunekunes have wonderfully short, wide faces. When fed from deep pans, they physically can't reach the bottom. To get leverage, they step into the dish with muddy hooves. The food gets filthy, competition spikes, and supper turns into a frantic scramble before the pans get flipped.

My hunch: bring dinner up to face level so there’s zero incentive to step in.

By offsetting this heavy wood trough’s floor 1.5 inches off the ground, I created a shallow, 2.5-inch basin. That tiny lift brought the food up, but the geometry is the real magic: if a pig tries to step into the raised trough, the angle actually pushes their snout further away from the grain.

They figured it out instantly: keep your feet on the grass, and dinner is right there. No shoved bowls, no muddy feed, no drama—just a calm family meal.

It is so easy to look at chaos and assign a character flaw. To see a shoving pig and decide you just have a bad animal. But the longer I farm, the more I realize that bad behavior is almost never malice. It’s usually just a symptom of a badly built container.

Tonight the herd ate quietly (but still enthusiastically— they’re still pigs after all) shoulder to shoulder, and the only thing that really changed was an inch and a half of scrap wood. They didn't learn better manners; I just finally built a table that let them stop worrying.

09/22/2026

Yesterday, five women came out to the farm to help haul wild grapevines out of the trees.

If you’ve never pulled mature wild vine, it’s not gentle gardening. It’s an honest tug-of-war. You’re throwing your whole weight backward, yanking yards of stubborn, choking wood down from the canopies where it’s smothered shrubs all summer.

Every so often we’d stop, catch our breath, and taste the tiny wild grapes hanging off the tendrils—shockingly tart, almost peppery.

It was easily 90 degrees. Sweat and gnats in everyone’s eyes. But nobody complained about the heat, because someone pointed out that the equinox was today.

It turned into a running refrain through the morning: It’s fine, because tomorrow the seasons turn. This has to be the last brutal day. The calendar says relief is coming.

There was something deeply good about watching that unruliness get tamed. After the heave and strain of pulling the vines down, we sat together and wound them into tight, tidy wreath forms—stiff, rebellious wood held in a calm circle purely by its own opposing tension.

Everyone kept taking these long exhales. They talked about how badly they just needed to yank on something, to sweat outdoors, to hear bugs and birds instead of the news.

Looking around online today, it seems like half the world is suddenly obsessed with the fall equinox—even folks who usually couldn’t care less about celestial orbits. I get it. We are all worn thin.

Between grocery bills, strained conversations, and the general feeling of bracing for the next shoe to drop, people are desperately hungry for a sign that things are going to change.

We want to trust the calendar because human promises feel so flimsy. We want to believe the planetary clock will force a balance we can’t seem to manage on our own.

Here on the farm, the dirt is still parched, and the gardens are still wearing the scars of a viciously hot and dry summer. But today, the scales level out anyway. For all its stubborn bluster, the sun is finally losing its teeth.

It’s okay to let yourself believe the turn is real. Take the breath. The shadows are stretching out, the circle holds, and the shift is underway.

09/18/2026

Someday our new pups will be broad-shouldered farm guardians who know every fenceline and shift in the wind by heart. Today, though, Olive & Caper are mostly soft fur, sudden naps, and questionable coordination.

With working dogs especially, it’s tempting to mentally leap past the years of training ahead and daydream about who they’re going to be—all the impressive things they’ll do. But it would be a mistake not to savor their ridiculous, clumsy beginnings.

Farm days can feel impossibly long, but the biological clock moves so quickly. Chores can wait five minutes. I want to actually live inside this one.

09/16/2026

I had to watch this a couple of times before I really saw Potato’s genius.

Turnip navigates the steep climb first, modeling the path. Potato waits at the top with quiet expectation. Then, to make the cue unmistakable, he doesn’t bark or beg—he simply turns his back and walks forward into the work. ‘The pack is moving. You belong with us. Come on.’

And when Olive and Caper finally scramble their little bodies to the peak, notice what doesn’t happen: there’s no party. No treats, no human applause, no performance. Potato and Turnip just keep walking. The work is the reward.

It’s such a calming reminder in how all young beings actually become capable. When a small child carries a single fork to the dinner table, they aren’t helping with housework; they’re doing identity building. They’re learning an internal sentence before they can even spell it: I belong here because I am needed here.

Livestock guardian dog breeds operate on that same frequency. They don’t want to do tricks for an audience; they want to know where the work is going. Their work is how they experience community.

Knowing that principle and living it, though, are two very different things. Five days into raising these two, I’m taking a lot of deep breaths. Even with plenty of experience training LGDs, I find these early days with new pups are equal parts joy and stress. Bringing them for chores triples my time, and tangled leashes test my patience.

Not to mention that voice in my head: ‘What if I mess this up? What if they end up an adolescent shelter statistic because I didn’t get this right?’ (They will NEVER go a shelter. No way.)

In those moments of friction, the panic reflex is to reach for total control—to micromanage every stumble and demand obedience just to survive the routine.

That’s why watching Potato walk away matters so much. It reminds me that my job isn’t to bark instructions. It’s to keep the perimeter safe so the stumbles are affordable, step out of the way, and let the real work invite them in.

You build capable partners on clumsy mornings like this—trusting that when you stop commanding them and instead invite them into their real purpose, they will find who they are.

08/27/2026

We’re trying to summon fall with our newest shirt design, drawn by the same hands that harvest the herbs, feed the pigs, and mend the fences— mine!

I call the work we do here ‘wholehearted agriculture’ because it’s about more than soil, yields, or acres worked. It’s a commitment to an entire web of relationships. It means choosing care over convenience, accepting the vulnerability of working alongside natural cycles instead of trying to dominate them, and treating every animal, plant, and acre as a living partner.

It’s farming with your whole heart.

Proceeds directly fund the daily feed, lifelong herd care, and ongoing stewardship of Slow Farm, with 5% donated to Kiss the Ground to support national soil advocacy.

Shop here: https://www.bonfire.com/slow-wholehearted-agriculture/

08/24/2026

We need to balance out our duck flock and find homes for some of our young drakes. Hatched 4/24/26. Second generation Ancona x Silver Appleyard. Beautiful feathering, nice size, savvy foraging abilities. Would be great for homestead breeding experiments or just barnyard buddies.

Good homes only. $10 ea, discount for 3+. Located in Cameron NC.

08/18/2026

At the monthly farm meeting, Howdy proposed a bold strategy for coping with the rest of August. The plan was met with rousing support and the initiative passed with immediate effect.

Address

Stanton Hill Rd
Cameron, NC
28326

Website

http://Www.slowfarmnc.com/

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Slow Farm posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Contact The Business

Send a message to Slow Farm:

Want your business to be the top-listed food & beverage service in Cameron?