That’s when the idea of draft horses started to tickle my consciousness. I was 16 when I had my first daydream about farming with horses down along the river. Over a decade later, after three years of training with a master teamster, here we are: Maude, Barney and me. Crazy what can happen once you think a thought.
That’s not to say it’s all been smooth sailing since I got my team home on that cold weekend in April. I hauled them from Idaho, white-knuckling over the pass during the late spring cold snap that dumped snow at the coast and froze cherry blossoms in Hood River. We got home safely, but when I unloaded Barney from the trailer, he was limping. His lameness would last for three weeks, due to a bacterial infection and then an abscess in his hoof.
Meanwhile, the horses were quarantined in a dry paddock to prevent them from overdosing on the lush spring grass. They worked over every fenceline they could in an effort to break free into greener pastures. They pushed over fence posts. They trampled gates. The rain poured down and turned the paddock to mud.
And all the while I’m pushing back against the growing fear that I am crazy. That this is just too much, on top of everything else. That I have bitten off way more than I can chew and the world is waiting for me to fail. And worst of all, that maybe all my ideals about farming aren’t practical after all — like my belief that I can eventually farm without tractors; my insistence on the sensibility and necessity of moving towards a grass-fueled agriculture instead of gas-fueled agriculture; my belief that draftpower is not Luddite but beautifully futuristic.
I was sick at the thought of it all, bracing for the body-blow from reality that felt inevitable.
One day in the midst of it all — with Barney still limping and a gate newly crushed — I called up Doc Hammill, my mentor who has taught me everything about work horses. I was choking back tears. “I don’t know if I can do it, Doc.”
April 23rd, 2009 at 6:14 pm
[...] invitation to all you college students to skip out on Cancún next year and come spend a week on my horse-powered vegetable farm in southwestern Oregon instead. Not only will you go home with a genuine farmer tan, you might just [...]