Thanks & Thoughts on Beginner's Team

Hey Everyone,

I’ve been meaning to write this for about a year now. Better late than never. Just wanted to thank everyone here for their input when we were looking for a team of horses this time last year. Thought I’d tell a little bit about that and our first year, to fill in those who helped us, and to provide one example for folks where we were a year ago. We applied for a KIVA loan (zero interest, crowd funded) loan of $5000 for a team and harness. Our loan: for a team of draft horses, to transition our vegetable farm to draft power was the fastest funded loan KIVA ever had (less than 48 hours!). We are 1/3 of the way into our 3 year payback period.

After looking at a few other teams, we found a team of 12 year old percheron/morgan crosses. They had been doing wagon rides. We, I think un-wisely, did not bring someone with more experience with us, or do a vet check. We did not look at or for a lot of important things we did not not too look for. We went with our gut (the first team Lisa and I both felt really good about). We we’re attracted most by their steady, “calm, relaxed, alert” demeanor, and the kind, warm, loving, “calm, relaxed, alert” demeanor of the Mennonite family we bought them from. We paid $4530 (Mar 2014) for the team w/out harness and including shipping about 80 miles to our farm. Not cheap, but no regrets.

We have had a really good year with them. We use them for our 100 member CSA of bio-extensive vegetables and eggs. We’ll have about 2.5/3 acres in veg. next year and about the same in annual cover crops. They are a great beginners team in that they are generally a very responsive, very forgiving, very hard working, very trusting team. They are also horses; and are bothered by flies (Duke especially), bothered by each other sometimes, and bothered by unclear instructions from us. They have been and continue to be excellent teachers of how I need to work on being better with my hands on the lines and better at managing their individual energies (and mine) to better work as a team, especially on very heavy and and very light loads. Daisy has been great single, ground driving and on the single horse cultivator. We are working with Duke on ground driving single, he’s very alert and not yet really relaxed into that. He’s coming along. We worked the team on a White Horse 712 sulky plow with a Keystone (Kverland) bottom, a white horse forecart w/ steel wheels, a cub 4′ double gang disk (w/ forecart), a 4′ spring-tooth harrow, a 8′ single gang cultipacker (w/ forecart), a MD one-row cultivator, we pull a utility trailer (w/ forecart) and had a work sled (stone boat w/ tongue). We used the horses for about half the plowing (hopefully all this second year on this rented land), all of the secondary tillage and all the cultivating. We’re hoping to add a better harvest wagon, they’ll be pulling a chicken coop wagon, a mower for managing cover crops and clipping pasture, and a manure spreader, and a drop lime spreader.

This forum has been a real blessing. So many times I’d turn to the forum to type a question and see it had already been mulled over by so many capable teamsters trying their best to get better. It was rare I didn’t get more than enough information to bring to our next day’s work session. This forum is a real resource for beginning farmers. Thank you all so much.

Anton