It occurred to me that many of you may be wondering – Why get a horse?  Or even, as one customer put it, “What on earth are you going to do with a 1600 pound horse?”

The answer to the second question is both simple and broad.  We’re going to farm with our horse, including plowing, tilling, cultivating, moving logs, plowing snow, etc.  We’ll do what many of our neighboring farms do with tractors.

(photo by Jeanine Dargis, kickass farm apprentice)

The answer to why a horse is deeper.  We found ourselves reaching a point in our farming where we needed some sort of power beyond our own hands.  We either needed a tractor, or a workhorse.  Ben had some pretty serious tractor lust at first, but agreed to research both options and really think about the implications of both.  For us, the choice was between a tractor, which requires fossil fuels, is constantly breaking (Ben is not someone who enjoys fixing machinery), and can spill oil and other toxic substances onto your fields.  Horses eat hay, not oil (which, if you grow your own hay, can create a closed loop on your own farm – something we strive for).  Horses “spill” fabulous manure, not oil.  And while horses certainly require work and care, we find that work far more pleasurable than dealing with sparkplugs.   One horse can work up to twenty five acres (!), which is the scale of farm we’ve always wanted, and a scale that we feel is the largest that we can work honestly and ecologically.

Ben took an intensive workshop at Fair Winds Farm in Vermont last winter, to learn to drive horses, and make sure that he did, indeed, enjoy the craft of working with them.  Much to our delight, he loved it, and we began searching in earnest for our own horse, which led us to our boy, Cole.  We still have much to learn, but luckily for us there are some knowledgeable teamsters in the area, and some great resources, such as Lynn Miller’s books.  Now that Cole is actually here, and we’ve begun working with him, the full pleasure of our decision is becoming known to us. I want to share these words from Miller’s book Training Workhorses, Training Teamsters, because I can’t imagine saying it any better.

“What do I feel after a hard day of working with my horses?  I feel blessed.  I feel, in that moment of life-measuring solitude, like I have been somewhere, done something, felt my capapbilities, learned something, and shared something.  I feel useful, capable, needed, and comically insignificant.  I feel both pride and humanity.  I feel like expanding this world of good work . . . Working horses is a small, some may say silly, idea measured against [the] enormous questions of petroleum dependency, environmental concerns, and collective spiritual health.  But it is at this bottom level that these questions must be addressed.”

Well, there’s much more to say, but that is a good start.  Suffice to say that even though Cole accidentally stepped on my foot today as I let him out to his paddock, and broke my pinky toe, I am so glad he’s here.