Hometown: Pittsburg, Mo.
Family: Husband Bill and son, Hunter (11)
In Town: Laura Copeland has been a high school math teacher for 18 years.
“I started at Buffalo High School, teaching there for a year before getting married and moving to be with my husband Bill. After Buffalo, I found a job in Steelville and taught for four years there. I taught for a year after that at Green Forest School in Salem before coming ‘home’ to Buffalo schools.”
In the Country: Laura works with Bill in his business, Bill Copeland Bobcat and Fencing, a land and brush clearing operation.
“I’m a teacher by day and a heavy machine operator nights, weekends and summers,” she laughed. “I grew up on a farm in the Lebanon, Mo., area where my great-grandparents, my grandparents and my parents, John and Betty Sanwald, also farmed. My dad was a sales representative for MFA in Southwest Missouri for years and was the voice of the Laclede County Fair for almost 40 years. I was always around the farm and the machinery, but I never imagined I’d be operating an excavator or a tree shear.”
Bill, Laura and their son Hunter are raising a dozen commercial pigs and 25 head of commercial Charolais/Gelbvieh crossbred cattle on 187 acres in rural Polk County, outside Pittsburg, Mo.
“We also have an orchard and a big garden. We raise our own beef, pork and eggs right now and we are looking into adding meat chickens later this year. We put up our own produce from the garden as well as fruit from the orchard – apples, pears, peaches, paw-paws and plums. We also raise all kinds of berries – blueberries, raspberries, gooseberries and strawberries.”
Both Bill and Laura Copeland grew up on Missouri farms so providing the very best and most natural farm products for their own family just comes naturally to the Copeland family.
