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Our Story
Welcome!
Laughing Springs Farm & Botanicals is a certified organic farm located on the edge of Boone on 17 acres of land that we are grateful to begin stewarding. Established in early 2022, we are building our farm slowly as we come to better know the land with each season.
We are still evolving our farm focus, but for now, we will be growing and sharing
fresh diversified vegetables, milled corn products (grits, cornmeal) and medicinal herbal products.
A bit about our farming practices:
As ongoing students and educators of agro-ecological practices, we are able to put into practice what we have learned through our experiences and those of other farmers and researchers. When we think of our farming practices, they encompass the entire farm as a whole - from the steep hills all the way down into the tiny streams and riparian area surrounding them. We are working to restore the forested areas by planting tree successions and forest medicinals. We are setting up our cropping areas with erosion control in mind by creating mini gardens in flattish ("Boone flat!") areas, utilizing terracing and wide buffer areas for pollinators to reside.
To build and maintain the organic matter in our soil, we practice a low-till and no-till system with deep attention to cover cropping with diverse species throughout the various seasons. We use soil tests to help guide us in any soil amendments we may need to add depending on the crop nutrient needs. We practice integrated pest management, which includes experimenting with varieties of crops that are least susceptible to pest and disease challenges, scouting consistently for the presence of pests and disease, removing badly affected plants and utilizing certified organic pesticides as needed. We feel passionate about on-farm breeding that allows us to select and create varieties that are well adapted to our farm site, are unique and tasty, and make novel combinations of genetic materials from friends, seed banks, travels, and fellow breeders/seed savers.
Finally, we absolutely LOVE being on the farm and immersed in this daily work and think that kind of presence makes a difference in creating a vibrant farm. They say the best fertilizer is a farmers footsteps....
Jay Bost
Jay came to farming originally out of a desire to understand how to sustain oneself in an ecologically responsible manner. Over the past 25 years, this desire has been enriched by a fascination with crop diversity in the world and work to collect, preserve and use this diversity through exploring agroecosystems around the world, seed saving, and plant breeding. Jay has worked on diversified market vegetable farms, seed production farms and orchards in North America and spent considerable time with farmers in Meso-america and the Pacific learning about low-input, diverse tropical agricultural systems. His interest in tropical agriculture and food systems led him to the University of Hawaii where he spent 10 years, first as a graduate student and then as a "farm coach" with GoFarm Hawai'i - a new farmer training program.
During all this Jay has developed crushes on maize, squash and amaranth (along with many other crops) and dedicated time to assembling diverse collections of them, learning how to grow them for seed, and to cross and select on them for the creation of new varieties with interesting culinary uses and adaptability to low-input agricultural systems.
Jay is excited to have fulfilled a life-long dream of operating a small, diverse family farm and is looking forward to sharing the harvests of short term and long term work with the High Country community in the form of produce, maize products, seed, nuts, fruit and plants.
Nora Rodli
Nora brings over 25 years of agricultural experience to the farm. During this time, she has explored and experienced a variety of opportunities from operating an organic diversified vegetable farm in New Mexico for 10 years, working for a variety of organic farms in Florida and St. Croix (USVI), and spending the past 9 years helping to build and manage a beginning farmer training program as the Statewide Program Coordinator with the University of Hawaii (GoFarm Hawaii).
She also has a health care background - as a registered nurse (RN), advanced public health nurse (APHN) and a licensed massage therapist (LMT). She is passionate about the primary role that food and food access play in health promotion and disease prevention. She is thrilled to finally be able to combine her love of agriculture and health together in the herbal apothecary - channeling this background into creating nourishing and supportive herbal products. A student of herbalism for the past 20 years, Nora has been slowly completing herbal medicine classes, attending conferences and learning from other herbalists to build her foundation as a crafter of botanical medicines. She continues to pour over the rich amount of herbal resources to deepen her understanding of medicinal herbs and their historical context of who and how herbs have been used along with skills in the art of creating botanical medicines.
Nora is grateful for the continued opportunity to learn, bridge the worlds of health and agriculture, and share the harvests and fun creations with her community.