All the Pretty Horses: Short and Stocky, Tall and Leggy

Not long ago, we applied for a Climate Resilience grant, saying everything that is wonderful about working with draft horses. Draft animals are an excellent source of both power and fertility, especially for a small acreage such as our farm. Draft horse work reduces soil compaction, carbon emissions, fossil fuel use, and pollution, as well as protecting species diversity (particularly amphibians), increasing soil health and capacity to hold water, and benefitting farm profitability and self-sufficiency.

Alas, we did not get the grant. But we still got the horses! (Of course, we had to use our own cash, earmarked to fix the rotting foundation of our house, to buy the horses. But hey, maybe the house will keep standing for a long time yet.)

We’ve been looking for horses for a while, and we had several leads on available teams. I was hoping for a short stocky mild team, exactly like the horses we have now, whereas my fellow was open to any kind of horses, as long as they were well-trained and could do the field work.

After two disappointing horse trips, my fellow went up to northern Maine, to visit three teams, carriage horses in Acadia National Park. It was supposed to be a two-day trip, with a knowledgeable horse teamster going along, while I stayed home to watch the greenhouse and our four horses. 

But my fellow kept sending me email messages: staying another night, so I can truck one team of horses from northern Maine to join the other two more southerly teams. Staying another night, so I don’t arrive home with new horses at midnight. Staying another night, because the truck sputtered and quit on the highway, and I want to get it fixed before I’ve got a trailer full of horses. 

Also he wrote: I’m thinking of buying the smallest team of the lot. What do you think?

Sure! I emailed back, and then I went to tell our four horses in their winter paddock about the nice small team, coming home soon. But when my fellow finally arrived on Monday afternoon with the horses, they looked mighty big.

“They’re really tall,” I said doubtfully. “I mean they’re beautiful. But they’re really tall.”

“They’re really nice,” said my fellow. “So nice you’ll think they’re short.”

“Oh, golly,” I said, “These were the smallest ones?”

“They’re leggy, but look at their little feet. The other teams had giant dinner plate feet.”

“Oh, golly,” I said.

“They’re your favorite color,” my fellow added, which was true. I love a bay horse, a rich red-brown coat with black points: mane, tail, ear edges, and lower legs. I like to call a bay horse “a horse-colored horse.” 

“They’re probably sister and brother, a mare and a gelding, 7 and 8 years old.” My fellow kept talking, as we moved our four horses from the paddock to the pasture. Our four were so ecstatic about going out on grass a month early that they didn’t even worry about the full horse trailer in the driveway. Of course, there wasn’t really much grass, and we gave them hay, but even the idea of grass is highly exciting. Plus it meant we could put the new horses in the paddock to get them used to things around the barn, without the fireworks of introducing everyone.

The new horses came off the trailer beautifully. They looked around curiously, and followed nicely up the driveway, while our four lined up at the pasture gate in astonishment and then went bucking and galloping away. The new horses were curious, but calm. They both started eating hay in the paddock, always a good sign of a relaxed horse.

I went over to the team. “I can hardly reach your backs,” I said to them, as the horses sniffed me in a friendly way.

“See?” said my fellow. “See how nice they are?”

“Fern and Willow,” I said. “Is that true? Are you so very nice? I think you must be. Welcome to your new home!”

Originally published in the Monadnock Shopper News, April 3 - April 9, 2024

Farmers and Horses: All Stirred Up

We farmers have been trying to remain calm. But we’re all stirred up, and not just because of the springy feeling in the air. It’s not just because we’re working in our greenhouses: raking beds, setting up propagation tables and heat mats, hauling in potting soil and seed packets.

No, we’re stirred up about horses. For one thing, we’ve been feeding grain all winter to our four draft horses, because they’re all at the age when a little extra in the winter helps. 

Now grain is highly exciting. It’s hard for a horse to keep calm in the face of a grain feeding, and it does a farmer good to remember the order of things: which horse to halter and bring in to the stalls first. Which horse will stand nicely next to which horse, even when grain is on the way. Which horse gets a little more grain, because they’re harder keepers, and which horse gets a little less, because they’re easy keepers.

Most important is which horse goes out of the stalls first. For instance, yesterday I brought Ben out first. He went nicely over to the hay waiting outside. Then I brought Molly out, not realizing she was going to race back in and check Ben’s grain bucket to make sure he hadn’t left any crumbs, either in the bucket or on the ground. 

Meanwhile Moon, who I hadn’t even bothered to halter, because he went into his stall on his own, decided to come out. But I was already asking Clyde to back out of his stall, and then I had to both keep Clyde in one place and try to get Moon out of the way at the same time. Finally Moon cooperated, but I had forgotten about Molly and Clyde.

Molly was sure Clyde was going to get the grain crumbs, so she started bucking and squealing, and Clyde stopped backing, and I said “Molly, for heaven’s sake!” and chased her out of the barn, while Clyde waited for me. Then I went back for Clyde, led him out, and was getting ready to take off his halter at the barn door, when Molly decided to squeeze past back into the barn.

“Molly, you turkey!” I said, letting go of Clyde, who went forward, and didn’t want to stop for me to take off his halter because now Molly was behind him. But he finally did, and pretty soon I had four horses calmly eating hay in the barnyard. 

All this is to say that grain is as exciting to horses as horses are exciting to horse farmers, which is why we farmers are all stirred up: we’re planning to buy a new team. We don’t really want to buy a new team, but our nice old horses don’t have the pep for another full garden season. 

We get pretty jazzed up on our horse trips, sure that this will be the perfect team for our little farm. So far we’ve been to Connecticut to look at a giant team of Belgians, about whom my fellow farmer said, “It makes my stomach hurt just to think of those dinner-plate hooves trying to walk down our narrow garden pathways. All those heads of lettuce going crunch crunch crunch.”

We’ve also seen a pair of black Percherons, who had the opposite effect: “It makes my stomach hurt to think of asking these two little horses to pull a full hay wagon up and down our hilly fields.” Way out in western New York State, we saw two more giant teams of Belgians, and a lovely little too-expensive pair of Belgian mares. 

Next we’re headed to Maine to see three more teams. Maybe one of these will be the perfect team for us! Meanwhile we visit our four perfect grain-loving horses in the barnyard, wishing they were a little younger, and reminding ourselves of just what kind of horses we’d like to have come live and work with us.

Originally published in the Monadnock Shopper News, March 6-March 12, 2024

A Pleasant, Peculiar People

Recently we farmers hosted a birding event. We prepared by reading our bird notebook, with its twenty years of birds we’ve identified here on the farm. Plus there are records of early frosts, and July hail, and lots of animal sightings.

“Remember the loon flying overhead?” we said. “Remember the bobcat? Remember the first time we saw the pileated woodpecker? Remember the bear, and the moose? Remember the yellow-rumped myrtle warbler by the pond?” 

We are amateur birders at best, but we had a pretty good list to read to our visitors, in case there weren’t any real birds out and about at the end of January. Plus we had our mammal and amphibian lists: even more diversion for birders not seeing birds.

The event, sponsored by the Cheshire and Windham County Conservation Districts, attracted a good group. We had the farmers, the conservationists, and experienced and brand-new birders, coming from Vermont and New Hampshire.

Now birders are a pleasant, interested, interesting people. Individually, they are eager to tell you their birding stories and to listen to your farm stories. Collectively, they are a bit more peculiar. 

But we had been warned: in the middle of the most fascinating remarks on small sustainable farming and its wonderful effects on bird populations and diversity, suddenly one birder would point at the sky, and the whole group would swing up their binoculars and turn as one to gaze at a tiny flying speck. Then there would be a long pregnant pause, followed by a spirited discussion of the speck. Then the crowd would turn smiling back to the farmer or conservationist that had been mid-speech.

There was only one point during the tour that there were no arms pointing or binoculars lifted. That was when we visited four really big birds in the barnyard: four draft horses, two of which ambled over for petting, and two of which kept eating their morning hay.

After we talked about our nice horses and our nice heavy use protection area grant in the barnyard, we went on to the garden. Suddenly the birders were all a-twitter! There were red crossbills, calling and flying! The farmers were all a-twitter too: we had never seen or knowingly heard a crossbill on our farm!

There was an evening grosbeak on top of a pine tree, a beautiful golden bird that sometimes visits our bird feeder, and who was a first for some of the birders. There were two red-tailed hawks. There were purple finches, New Hampshire’s state bird. By then some of the birders were in bird-list bliss.

At each stopping point we farmers told a bird story: the red-tailed hawk that had gotten caught in our former mesh garden fence, and how glad we were to set it free, and how glad we were for another conservation grant that allowed us to put up a metal fence that didn’t catch birds. All the birders nodded happily. 

We talked about how birds benefit from the farm’s crop diversity, mulch, cover-crops, and low-till agriculture. We mentioned the tree swallows’ lovely liquid call as they swoop around our garden catching bugs. We pointed to all the wild, bird-friendly edges of the garden. 

We went on to the pond, the mushroom yard, and the fields, where the birders showed their mammal mettle by identifying possum, rabbit, and deer tracks. We talked about pasture conservation projects, and one birder said maybe we could see flocks of nightjars migrating if we stood on the edge of our biggest field at dusk in September. 

We liked that idea, especially since the only nightjar we’ve heard on our farm was identified by a visitor. We’re not even sure that hearing a bird counts for your bird list, but as I say, we are amateur birders, so we’ll take everything we can get. That day we got 18 different species, and we got a nice bunch of birders on a warmish day in January, loving birds and loving farms.
 

Originally published in the Monadnock Shopper News, Feb 7 - Feb 13, 2024

Pretending Farming Doesn't Exist

It was such a wretched season on our New Hampshire vegetable farm, what with the cold wet spring, and the limping collapsing draft horses, and the cold wet limping collapsing farmers, that we were glad to say goodbye to the whole year. 

Once our CSA vegetable distribution was finished up, and our horses were settled into the winter paddock, and the limpers and collapsers had recovered, all we had left was cold and wet, which we've solved by sitting by our woodstove. 

We sit by the stove, and ask ourselves probing questions, such as "Now why are we doing this again?"

Then we refuse to give ourselves a pep talk about fresh food and sustainable farming and local economies and healthy environments. Instead we pretend that farming doesn't exist. What fun!

It is so much fun that we take ourselves to a nice concert in South Hadley, Massachusetts. The concert is in a pretty little Episcopalian church, clean and bright and dry and tidy, which reminds us not at all of farming. 

We listen to the wonderful Scandinavian folk'appella group Kongero. Four women with stunning voices sing in Swedish for two hours, and it doesn't matter that we can't understand a word of the lyrics, because certainly they are not about farming. 

The singers do take pity on the mainly English-speaking audience, and tell us a little in English about their group. They say that kongero means spider, in a Swedishish-Norwegian dialect, and that a music reviewer suggested that they were one voice with eight legs. 

Although we still don't know exactly why the group choose kongero for a name, we can only assume that the Swedish have great love for spiders. We are also a little concerned that spiders, especially the big beautiful slightly scary garden spiders, are veering awfully close to, you know, farming. 

Then one of the singers introduces the next selection, a very old song. A very old . . . cow-herding song. Uh-oh. She even translates the verses. 

Then she tells us how she spent her summer working at a living history museum. It was a historical farm of the late 1800s museum. Oh, geesh. Not only that, she was the goat-herder. Not only that, it was a beautiful song. 

Well, we gave up pretending that farming didn't exist. Instead we had a nice little chat at intermission with the goat-herding singer, about our nice little CSA farm with our nice not very little draft horses and our nice many-sized vegetables, and she told us that she grew up in a 24-person northern Swedish village, on a small farm with chickens and sheep and pigs and cows and horses. 

She said that in Sweden, too, agriculture has been taken over by big corporations, but that little farms were coming back. Oh, nice little farms, keep on trying! was the general gist of our conversation. 

So there we two New Hampshire farmers were, right back to farming, and we were even feeling kind of happy about it. If only we could sing as beautifully as a spider when we were herding our (virtual) cows and our (virtual) goats and our (very real) horses and our (very real) vegetables, we'd be doing pretty well. 

Originally published in the Monadnock Shopper News, Jan 10 - Jan 16, 2024