WHERE
Our Story
took root
Some places are part of your story
from the very beginning
This one is ours.
For decades, this stretch of prairie has been part of our life —
land we farm, yet one that has always felt set apart.
Peaceful, natural, and deeply quiet.
The kind of place that slows everything the moment you arrive.
It’s here where our story began in 1993 —
now unfolding with a clarity only time can bring.
One quiet spring evening
After a movie in the city
I was a month shy of nineteen, and he was twenty-three, sitting beside me in his truck after our first date — and neither of us seemed ready for the night to be over. As I reached for the door, he paused, then asked gently,
Do you wanna come
see my cows ?
Those words still take me back.
Instead of calling it a night, we headed toward a piece of his family’s farmland — a good two miles of dirt road, off-grid and tucked away. Leaving the pavement behind, the quiet deepened.
We parked near the old farmhouse that still stood on the property at the time, where the cows were kept. The river moved nearby. Trees framed the clearing. The sky felt wide, and everything seemed to slow on its own.
He introduced me to his cows there, speaking about them with an easy familiarity — the kind that comes from knowing a place well. Standing beside him, listening, I felt something settle. A calm. A sense of rightness I didn’t yet have words for.
At the time, it felt simple — just two young people lingering a little longer on a spring night. But looking back now, I can see that evening for what it was: our beginning.
The years between
Life unfolding, season by season
In 1997, we married and began building a life and family together — slowly — guided by seasons, our work, and weather that has always dictated so much. Ordinary days filled in between the big ones, and over time those ordinary moments became the ones that mattered most.
And all through the years, this place stayed with us.
Whenever we returned, it felt set apart. Quieter than the rest. As if it carried its own pace — steady and unhurried — independent of whatever else life was asking of us at the time. It remained there in the background, patient and unchanged, as if it knew — before we did — that it still held more of our story.
What we’ve always called it
And why it still fits
Within our family, this land has always been known as the Dauphinais Farm — named after the family who owned it before ours, and pronounced, in our way, “Duff-nee.”
When we began imagining what it might become beyond farming alone, we wanted a name that honoured both its history and how it has always felt to us. Down Home Farm carried that meaning — a quiet nod to what we’ve always called it, and to the slower rhythm that has defined it all along.
The name is also inspired by the song Down Home by Alabama —
Just off of the beaten path,
a little dot on the prairie map,
things move at a slower pace,
where you can fall back home.
— words that have always felt true here.
Still becoming
In its own time
This stretch of land has never asked to be more than it is.
In a world that moves fast and asks for constant output, it has remained steady — offering quiet instead of noise, space instead of spectacle. It reminds us that meaning doesn’t have to be loud, and that love, like land, can be enduring without needing to be extraordinary.
And it continues here — opening gently to others, welcoming photography, stays, and other quiet possibilities the land may hold, shaped by time, weather, and the stories that gather here.
Faye + Bryan
Written with my whole heart, since that quiet spring evening in 1993 when our story began. — Faye Caroline Fossay
