Christian Heckle @prairierose.co
Many of us are drawn to rural life because of a desire to slow down. We long to sit on a front porch with a cup of tea, listening to the birds and watching the sun go down, rather than rushing from work to the gym, then home to make dinner, then rushing to watch TV just to feel like we’ve had some downtime before doing it all over again.
But as Christian Heckle of @prairierose.co—whose family has been living rurally and farming in Alberta for five generations—points out that as “a 31 year old woman in 2026 - life is such a hustle. There is little time to sleep let alone sit on a front porch with a tea and listen to the birds. Life in 2026 demands so much it can feel quite crippling, so I long for those simpler times often.”
If you follow her on Instagram, you’ll notice that she often photographs old farmyards and homesteads because she loves the simplicity in the old prairie landscape. A feeling that is quite foreign to her, even though she’s lived away from the hustle and bustle of the city her whole life.
“A two story home on a lonesome field, abandoned likely because of how hard life once was on the prairie, is a reminder of how fortunate I am to live now, but for some reason always longing for the simplicity they once knew that I feel is a stranger to me”
To make a living out on the land, Christian raises a herd of Highland and Simmental cows, runs a tallow skincare company @prairierose.tallowskincare, is a professional photographer, and maintains an Instagram following of over 200k. It is no wonder she hardly has time to sleep.
For those who are fortunate to live rurally, I think you would all agree that living away from the city doesn’t automatically mean more peace and idle time to soak it all in. Quite the opposite. Usually your responsibilities grow exponentially. Now there are animals to take care of, machinery and buildings to maintain, land to tend to, on top of working, cooking, cleaning, and so on. One could argue that rural life is even more of a hustle than city life. Maybe what separates the two isn’t the amount of work, but the nature of it.
Perhaps, the privilege of rural life is the quality of the hustle.
A sleepless night helping to deliver a calf feels easier to swallow than a late night on your computer prepping for a meeting in the office.
Maybe it isn’t a slower and more peaceful existence that we long for, but a tangible one.
Christian’s life may be busy, but it is busy in service of something that many of us feel tethered to deep down and have a hard time finding in an office building.
“I’ve grown up my whole life around cattle and truly feel they are a piece of me, there isn’t a moment that goes by that I don’t think of my cows. And I constantly am thinking how to make their and our lives better. To do that you must respect the land we all live on. How to better sustain the earth and all the vegetation. That’s why we’ve gotten into regenerative agriculture. We work with the earth instead of against it.”
Christian and her family have moved away from large-scale grain farming and planted 1,000 acres back to grassland. They have helped the land heal by rotationally grazing their cattle, and they raise healthier animals without feeding grain to speed weight gain or using growth hormones.
“They live just the way nature intended and just the way they would have been raised by my ancestors,” says Christian.
She started her tallow company in service of that mission, too, taking organ fat that would have typically been wasted and turning it into a skincare product that is exceptionally well suited to our dry skin out here on the prairies.
Despite the relentless work of rural life, Christian reminds us why we still long for it. We want to touch something whole again—something natural, real and material that we can understand. Something that reminds us of who we are and where we came from.
Christian is wearing The Woodland Sweater, size 2 in Birch and The Parkland Sweater in size 2.
You can find her tallow skincare here and her beef at Flat Cap Butcher in Calgary.
