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Local Cooling Farms

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Bogalusa, LA
Local Cooling Farms

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Farming sustainably to produce healthy food, treat livestock with respect and dignity, rebuild ecosystems and sequester carbon into the soil.

Local Cooling = the opposite of Global Warming. We believe that when we look to nature as our guide, we can produce nutrient-dense food in a way that restores and regenerates the soil and our ecosystem versus depleting it. On 60 acres of land south of Bogalusa, we are building our farm from the ground up (literally)! Because grazing animals (especially ruminants like cattle and goats) on pasture and silvopasture can actually sequester carbon back into the soil, our name name reflects our mission to practice regenerative agriculture methods that reverse global warming and climate change rather than contribute to it. Our primary goals are to:

-Grow nutrient-dense food for people
-Raise livestock with dignity, care and transparency
-Recycle some of our community’s agricultural residuals
-Rebuild a healthy ecosystem on our property and the surrounding acreage
-Sequester carbon back into the soil (hence the name!)

Currently we raise hens and hogs on pasture for eggs and pork and rotationally graze cattle and goats for beef and goat meat. All of our farm products are sold through our gardening-store-turned-farm-store, Laughing Buddha Nursery.

09/30/2026

This is going to be a great conference in Nola Nov 16-18 to learn how to utilize biochar in your agricultural venture. NABC invited me to attend the conference so I’ll be there as well.

09/01/2026

The end of August has a some important of anniversaries for me — I moved to Louisiana in 2009 for what I thought would be one year for an AmeriCorps VISTA position and in 2016, I quit my job to focus on farming and Laughing Buddha Nursery full time.

Of course, there’s also the hurricanes — Katrina that was responsible for pulling me here for the AmeriCorps position at a rebuilding organization, Isaac which involved the composting facility Grant started taking in literal tons of tree and vegetative debris and Ida that we rode out at the farm.

All of these anniversaries kind of all swirl together, but mostly 2026 has me thinking about 10 years of full-time farming.

It feels like there’s so much I could say and yet it’s hard to articulate! It has been 100 times harder than I thought it would be in ways I couldn’t have known back then and also simultaneously 100 times more worth it than I could have imagined either.

There’s the soil and ecosystem rehabilitation, learning so much about yourself by learning about livestock and complex biological systems (and also sales and marketing and consumer behavior) and just the deep rootedness and knowing a tiny piece of the world so intimately.

Not to mention taking care of that land and watching it change and growing nourishing food from it.

I also definitely didn’t know how much I’d end up loving goats (and sweet besties like Pippa especially 🐐).

Maybe I’ll write more soon, but for now that’s all I’ve got! And here’s some throwbacks to 2016. 👉

08/04/2026

Happy birthday to the guy who keeps everything running around here!

Chocolate cake with pistachio buttercream this year. You can scroll all the way back to last year for a carrot pecan cake! Same shirt, too! 😉

07/14/2026

🐐 Sometimes things just work out!

The most goats ever left our farm at once in late June, all headed to the same farm near Jackson, Miss.

We raise meat goats because we have so much browse, vines and other types of vegetation really suited for them.

But doe kids grow so much slower than bucklings that we prefer to sell the ones that we don’t need as future mommas in our herd to other farms and homesteads as breeders or pets.

Often we sell them in pairs and trios and quads, but this year a family in Mississippi wanted all of them. They’re on 500 acres and already have cattle, sheep and goats, but were looking to significantly expand their herd with animals that have been breed to do well in our climate without tons of crutches and inputs.

Which, of course, is exactly what we’ve been breeding for for 10 years.

And they also bought our two herd sire bucks as were ready to bring in some new Kiko genetics as we do every 3-4 years or so.

The sorting and load up and trailer transfers could not have gone smoother. I’m so proud of these goats and how it worked out. I always wish we could keep them all, but the fact that they’re all going to one place together makes me really happy.

And of course, you can bet I did keep a few special does back. More on who next time! 😍✌️

07/06/2026

We were thrilled to host Tammany Baumgarten and friends from the Louisiana Native Plant Society last Sunday for a tour about our regenerative farming practices and our wildlife and plant conservation efforts.

We had a great walk, showing them the long leaf pine and oak trees we select and baby and together identifying tons of other native plants, along with explaining our farming practices and efforts around habitat creation, water retention, soil building and more.

To cap off the visit, Tammany surprised us by awarding our farm with the Gold Level of the Louisiana Natural Habitat Certification. This program aims to encourage property owners and managers to increase and protect the ecological value of their land to benefit wildlife and natural systems.

The certification was such a cool surprise. There’s so many things we do on the farm that are their own reward — seeing pollinators doing their thing on native flower blossoms, birds feeding off of wild berries, an explosion in the rabbit and quail population, healthier soil that absorbs more water after heavy rains and the list goes on.

But it’s also really nice to receive the recognition because farming this way certainly isn’t easy or without costs and blood, sweat and tears. And sometimes it seems like people expect it to be a manicured golf course, when for a whole variety of reasons, we want it a little wilder!

I have been wanting to start a blog series about Why We Farm the Way We Farm (and How, too!), so I figured this surprise certification would be a good first blog in the series.

The pictures (here and more on the blog) a collection of some of the most photogenic native plants on our land recently (meadow beauty or rhexia, a bumble bee in a white swamp mallow flower, paspalum grass, pink swamp mallow, stokes asters, swamp sunflowers, maypop or native passionfruit and of course, goldenrod!).

Read more about why we care about all this stuff and our practices around wildlife habitat creation and restoration on the blog here: https://www.laughingbuddhanursery.com/blog-1/2026/local-cooling-farms-is-now-a-louisiana-certified-natural-habitat

06/11/2026

We have a bunch of beautiful kids born in February ready to be weaned!

I always always can come up with a reason to keep every single one, but we don’t need 60 more goats. 😂

There’s 25 doelings and 30 bucklings, in tact, though we will be banding soon.

We also have a few yearling does and wethers that we could let go of, too.

Our herd are mainly triple crosses of Kiko, Boer and Myotonic breeds, but we had a line of five way crosses of Saanen and Oberhasli with the other three breeds.

We do not do any prophylactic worming or use any pharmaceuticals on the doe kids (we do vaccinate bucklings for tetanus when banding). We haven’t wormed any goat in the breeding herd in years.

Instead, we have aimed to cull for traits we don’t like (like limited natural parasite resistance or other health problems, low milk supply or rejecting kids). This has resulted in a hardy herd full of great mothers.

As meat breeds, they have plenty of milk to feed their kids, but not much beyond that for regular milking.

Full details on the blog: https://www.laughingbuddhanursery.com/blog-1/2026/february-born-goat-kids-for-sale

04/20/2026

Our spring litters of piglets from our gilts (first-time mommas) made it to two weeks old today. 🐷☺️

Well, two of the three litters were born Easter Sunday, the third two days later.

One of gals did not like her accommodations and broke the gate to her stall, jumped over some boards and spent hours making a nest of sweet gum saplings in the rain. Bless her heart, she had the biggest litter of the three and we didn’t have major rain or storms forecasted after she farrowed so we let her be.

Last night when it rained, she brought them back into the stall, go figure! I guess she likes Suite B of the farrowing barn now. 😉

The other two litters with compliant mommas are doing well, too, and the Ginger momma has the chillest temperament we’ve had in a while and very chill piglets to match her vibe.

Red momma wins the award for being the most careful and hyper aware though.

All in all, pretty good across the board for three first timers!

(Swipe all the way to the end for sleepy piglet belly rubs 😍🐷).

04/03/2026

Married to .localcoolingfarms for 10 years today! 😍

Somehow we managed to start , raise thousands of chickens and hundreds of goats, pigs and cattle, turn into a local grocery, buy the land next to us, build a house on it and… survive and stay married!

It’s certainly been a wild ride and I wouldn’t have it any other way. Or, I would change some things, but I wouldn’t change the person I’m doing all this with for anything.

We celebrated our anniversary by getting outside at 5 this morning to move some chickens around and make space for another big hatch coming out of the incubator (the last pic).

It’s busy season for the soil business and lots of livestock related things happen in the spring, too, (like hatching chicks so we have enough eggs in the fall and winter!), so you gotta make hay while the sun is shining, as the say, and look around and realize that you’re living the life you wanted!

Address

57355 Sam Mizell Road
Bogalusa, LA
70427

Opening Hours

Wednesday	7:30am - 12pm
Thursday	7:30am - 12pm
Friday	7:30am - 12pm
Saturday	7:30am - 12pm

Telephone

+15042343564

Website

https://www.laughingbuddhanursery.com/local-cooling-farms/

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