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Touchstone Farm makes move to Lyndeborough

LYNDEBOROUGH – Touchstone Farm, an educational and therapeutic not-for-profit that offers programs, summer camps, equine educational workshops and certifications, has announced its permanent move from its former Temple, New Hampshire location to its new home at 223 Old Temple Rd., in Lyndeborough.

Owner Kris Young said the horses were fostered during the moving period by members of the community. She jokingly referred to this as the horses spending some time at their “vacation homes.”

“We’re closed and own the property and are very excited about it,” she said. “We’ve got all the horses back – they were gone for three weeks to a month. And the community was just amazing to step up and take in some of the horses in between when we could close and reopen.”

The staff at Touchstone works to nurture connections between humans and horses while teaching self-confidence and personal growth.

Young said the organization is looking to the future as to where the farm may take them, and what new endeavors are around the bend.

“We’ll be continuing our veterans programming,” she shared. “We’re looking forward to offering all the programs that we did before.”

For those unfamiliar with Touchstone, Young said they needed to find a property that was a better fit for the farm in general.

“We spent about a year looking for the right property,” she said. “The owner in Temple wanted to do something with the property that she owned. And it’s worked out great for both organizations.”

During their search, the pandemic struck, further complicating the move.

“It was compounded,” Young said. “Everything just stopped when the world went into lockdown. We couldn’t really go look at properties. We could look at the outdoors part but to look at the indoor parts really had a damper put on it.”

Young said while the process was stalled, finding the right property simply took additional time.

“It was hard finding the right spot because of all of the different programming that we do,” she said. “To find a property that we could immediately start with most of our programming and then expand into the rest of our programming was kind of tough in this market as a not-for-profit.”

The closing moved from September to October. Young is thrilled that the move and the health crisis didn’t prevent the farm from trying to maintain a sense of normalcy.

“We maintained all of our clients and none of our staff had to lose their jobs and all of our clients still got to see their horses,” she said. “And we found a great property and it’s turned out so nice that it was only 1.8 miles from where we were before.”

Young said the new digs will open up a world of possibilities for Touchstone to continue to do the work they do with riding and driving lessons and lots of specialty weekends.

“As a not-for-profit, to be able to own the property is just fabulous,” she said. “There are more grants available and more things like that.”

There are 30 horses on the property, versus a slightly higher number at the old location as three horses were retired.

“We were looking to retire those three before we moved,” Young said. “When we moved, it just fell into place with the help of the community.”

In addition to Touchstone’s plethora of classes and programming, Young said they are talking to the town of Lyndeborough about building new quarters.

“We offer a residential summer camp and we offer some weekend veteran programming,” she said. “So we’re speaking to the town about building something similar to that, which will not only work for us and benefit our organization, but the town as well.”

Touchstone Farm will be hosting a Grand Opening virtual event on November 1.

For more information, visit touchstone-farm.org.

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