Boone’s Lick Heritage Farm

BLH Farm, short for Boone’s Lick Heritage Farm, is a regenerative operation located just outside Columbia, Missouri, founded by Matt and Laura Arthur. With a strong focus on soil health and sustainability, BLH uses no-till practices and permanent raised beds to grow USDA-certified organic vegetables, flowers, mushrooms, and medicinal herbs. Their operation includes composting systems that divert thousands of pounds of food waste annually through bokashi and vermicompost methods. This compost is used as mulch and top dressing in beds, improving water retention and suppressing weeds while avoiding herbicide contamination—an increasing concern among local growers.

In recent years, BLH Farm has significantly expanded its mushroom cultivation. They grow an array of gourmet mushrooms including lion’s mane, Italian oysters, black knights, elm oysters, chestnuts, reishi, and pioppinos. Each species requires tailored care: pioppinos thrive in the hottest, most humid parts of the fruiting room, while Italian oysters, their top-performing variety, are cold-shocked in a walk-in cooler to initiate fruiting and yield massive clusters. Matt said there are some challenges when growing certain types like shiitake and chestnut due to potential for contamination and mess, but still values them for their taste and market demand. Lion’s mane remains a customer favorite, selling at high volumes to both restaurants and farmers markets.

Mushroom production at BLH now reaches an impressive scale, with more than 240 blocks in rotation weekly and over 150 pounds sold to restaurants. Matt is currently refining methods for maitake, a mushroom he believes could scale up dramatically. In addition to fresh mushroom sales, they also process reishi and lion’s mane into powders. With streamlined operations supported by staff from the restaurant industry and a GAAP-certified approach to data and harvest, BLH Farm blends innovation with resilience. Even the farm’s compost byproduct is thoughtfully used or considered for sale, showing how every aspect of the operation supports their closed-loop, sustainable ethos.