There are draft animals in the suburbs!

Hello from Swarthmore PA. Since I can’t live on a farm and know that the time is coming when I will need farming skills I have been learning about it on my half acre of upscale suburban land in SE Pennsylvania. I have two working dogs, have been keeping bees for three years, have 8 raised beds. I got my draft animals, two mini-goats, in May 2010. OK you can laugh now.

I attended a sustainable agriculture 2 day workshop on rotational grazing of grass-fed livestock, and wondered what those folks would do without electricity to run their high tensile fences, and how they would get the supplemental hay out to their stock when the forage is frozen under two feet of snow and petrol costs $10.00 a gallon.

Horses, oxen, and dogs will be necessary.

Those of us who have to work because we have kids in college and are saddled with expensive real estate and the associated taxes, who are married to couch potatoes, and who don’t have the skills to even have access to farm land have to learn somewhere. That is how I found your forum.

In my back yard we are learning Whoa, Gee, Haw, and also Come by!