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Gabe Ayers
KeymasterSorry for entering this thread late. I think the concept of stopping the horses when everything is going just right is one of the hardest things for new teamsters to learn. By stopping them when they are doing well or exactly what you want, (including choosing a place that gives them a good starting place next time) – is positive reinforecement or using whoa as a reward. It has been said the the greatest reward for any beast of burden is cessation of demand. They will try hard when the think they can do it and get clear signals from the driver. It takes a stout team to move weight like these loads and a good hand to give the signals to start and stay on the load. They must be built up to this level of performance, it doesn’t happen by accident. Great efforts by great horseman and great horses.
I have to comment that the comrodiary among the participants is deep and meaningful, even a moving emotional experience as expressed by Scott G. I experienced the same thing a couple of weeks ago when Simon Lenihan visited for a week here in Virginia and we toured the region checking in on several of the HHFF practitioners. So much in common regardless of location and we all should benefit from knowing we are not alone out here in the woods with our horses, although that is exactly where most of us want to be. Paradox, yet inspirational. LIF is indeed one of those experiences and I would love to be there some day if invited again. Great job, perpetuating the culture as only the real thing can do. Kudos to all of you.
Sorry, I have new computer here and don’t have spell check working yet, although everything new is supposed to be better….
Carry on good folks, please also excuse my repeating myself, seems to happen with age…
Best Regards,
KeymasterHey Gulo,
These HHFF DVD’s are not intended to be instructional as much as inspiration and demonstration.
I do have a sample contract that we often use. I have posted it here in the past, but seem to run our of available space on this site for attachments and am not sure if it is still here. You may contact me via personal email below and I will send you a copy of what we use, which of course can be altered to suit your particular situation.
I agree with the unsustainable nature of our travel in this modern world. It is also interesting for me to share the fact that in the beginning I was self taught for the most part, as there were no mentors available back in the early seventies when I became committed to draft horse use. That is not an entirely bad thing. It may lead to you developing your own techniques and a very clear understanding of signals through the classic trial and error method, if one is able to survive the error factor.
I think the most important factor is you wanting to know how to do this work and being determined to do it. It seems the key to gaining knowledge is wanting to know. Good Luck and carry on.
There are great horsemen in Europe that may help some way and some of them have DVD’s also. The Cech Republic has a fellow name Joesph that is awesome with his horses and runs a government breeding station and logs with his horses and trains horses full time as well as breeding horses with the several stallions he keeps. He won the log obstacle course at Perkestarke (sp.) last year, which is no easy feat. I am not sure of the contact for this fellow but you may be able to find it through the http://www.fetcu.com site.
Best Regards,
KeymasterLately we have been working in owner build situations. This means we manage a landowner’s woodlot and harvest worst first individuals and process them on site into beams for timber frame construction. We simply price the material comparable to the value from any other sourcing method plus about 20%. This is working very well at the moment. The pay per hour of course varies by site conditions. We simply back into the price for the products delivered to the timber frame processers and pro rate the components to the satisfaction of the practitioners involved. This is becoming a much more popular method than selling raw logs delivered.
We are currently working on a project in Blacksburg, Va. for the Warm Hearth Retirement Village that will use the material to construct a pool enclosure and adjoining buildings.
This does require some knowledge of the markets and committed end users or clients as the market for the services. When one is a service provider (logger, forester, saw mill operator, and trucker) there is more room for pricing of the delivered goods in a truly value added way. We find that many landowners will work with this system for the same reasons they are interested in low impact forestry from the onset. It is about the quality of services, the protection of the natural beauty of their forest and the source story that is a green value for their future use in selling their services or products in the case of the retirement village and achieves the landowner’s objectives as a private home builder.
Anyone interested can contact me through email for more information. I have not visited DAP frequently lately so may not get back here in a timely way to respond.
Good Luck getting started… but the important thing is to do exactly that….get started. All of the experienced and sucessful hands on here got started at some point and have learned along the way. Most are still learning, which is possibly why they are still engaged, certainly is the case for me personally.
I think an important point here is that there are no set ways to do anything and having animal power presents much wider applications and flexibility than conventional methods. Adapting to the situation at hand is a benefit of this culture and being responsive to the landowner’s objectives is important. Educate yourself about the forest and share your knowledge with your landowner’s.
Best Regards,
KeymasterEmail notification seems to work fine. Thanks, and I look forward to getting down to work!
-BradKeymasterHealing Harvest Forest Foundation has two DVD’s available about modern horse logging.
The Chronicles of the Biological Woodsmen
$20.00
HHFF
8014 Bear Ridge Rd.
Copper Hill, VA. 24079Also Rural Heritage has:
Restorative Forestry Techniques available through http://www.ruralheritage.com
We consider these state of the art media, but they are not intended to be instructional information. Serving an Apprenticeship with a proven practitioner is the best way to learn. If you have to travel to spend time with someone that is doing this work successfully – consider it a wise investment in your on safety and potential success in this culture.
Good Luck,
KeymasterJAC,
I am not sure what boredom means in a negative sense for your horses?
I think there are advantages to the treadmill. One is that walking in a straight line on a slight uphill is less difficult than walking in a circle, given uniform resistance. The fact that the horse can work naked or unharnessed is a plus too, since it eliminates any harness wearing problems and the entire energy collection system takes up less room. The treadmill can be put under a smaller roof than the circular horsepower rigs. It is on sled runners and can be moved around by horses pretty easily.
I have never used the circular horsepower systems, but I have ground or crushed a lot of sorghum cane with a horse walking in a circle. This can lead to sore shoulders and generally sore horses muscularly. I have also seen some horses that would get dizzy/vertigo when walking in a circle for a long time. It seems the bigger the horse the larger the circle needs to be to reduce that result.
When I think of a horse being bored, I think maybe they are falling asleep at the wheel or are hard to keep on task as in keep moving or doing what we ask. The nature of the elevated bed on the treadmill eliminates that concern because the treadmill floor moves under the horse until you set the brake, so they don’t have much option to stop moving. It does take some skill and a well trained animal to get them on the treadmill. It is quite a step up to get on the device and some encouragement may be needed. There have been folks that set the treadmill up stationary and built a ramp to make getting on it easier. Once a horse has walked a while on the treadmill keeping them going isn’t very hard and when you say whoa and set the brake they are usually quite content to stand still.
We are doing some work to enhance the treadmill’s wear features by installing a vulcanized rubber mat around the treadmill, just to slow the wear on the wooden treads and soften the surface for the horse. A horse or animal has to have smooth shoes or be barefoot to work this device with just the wooden treads. They come stocked with white oak and if/when we replace them we will use Black Locust.
The treadmill is available from Athens Enterprises, in Liberty, Kentucky.
I suspect you can make a circular horse power rig easier than a treadmill.
Good luck with using the animals any way possible.
Jason Rutledge
KeymasterMark-
I use this design in the woods and fields, and I really like it. It makes for a short pole, and the Barden design is simple and easy to use. I have a paper copy of the plans I used, which were given to me by Ben Canonica, based on Les’ original. I can mail them if you want – they are very detailed and easy to follow. I did make a few small changes, but not much.KeymasterI hope one of them is the Suffolk cross baby you have in the oven there Donn…
Chad Vogel made it SDAD, so good to see him and of course putting him to any tasks that arose was comforting. Maybe next year we’ll get you down.
We did have several notables from NE, including Jay and Janet Bailey and John Hammond. I think they enjoyed the invitational horse pull.
Chad Miano’s Suffolk’s won it, which wasn’t a surprise to those that knew the teams. But we were all impressed by Farmer Brown’s team splitting last years 1st and 2nd (Richard Redifer’s Percheron’s) place pairs with his good Belgians. It was fun… I just announced the pull and had a blast.
Best Regards,
Jason Rutledge
KeymasterIf you can get a local videographer to work reasonably then it would be another product to sell to support upcoming Field Days. Sometimes they can be expensive, the shooting and editing are time consuming and use expensive equipment, but the media is so appropriate for modern use to educate the public.
Joe Mischka at Rural Heritage has been great for us to work with. I am not sure of his ability to do this financially at this point. He is committed to the culture and that makes him worth considering as a partner in perpetuating that same culture. It is clearly mutually beneficial.
If you do film it, put yourself in front of the camera and tell it the way you see it. Of course mic up your other stars and make the most of their skills and culture too. You have plenty of them up there.
Best of luck with NEAPFD, wish I was there…
Here is a link to an interview with Wendell Berry at SDAD: http://www.ferrum.edu/ironblade
Kind Regards,
KeymasterNot sure about the pto rpm at an average walking speed. We will try to find out more about this as we are going to have to supply horses for the display as SDAD, so we will do some experimenting in the next couple of weeks.
KeymasterThis is a brilliant adaptation. You could just mow in the opposite direction after raking and clip the stuff mashed down. It would be like a cultivator going down each row twice. While in England I saw little small side delivery rakes that the operator rode behind (dusty) that were small enough to go between those rows and adjusted properly wouldn’t hardly touch the soil.
I think they were mostly antiques, but would work in this application. A man named A.P.Thompson did this in orchards in Va. years ago, actually cultivated legumes between the rows and raked it under the drip line. He used a combination of yellow blossom sweet clover and then scratched in some buckwheat which made a great honey crop for his bees. Then he mowed it all down and put it under the trees as mulch. I guess trees and vines were both part of a forest as some point, so treating them with forest type organic matter seems natural.KeymasterAround $3500 for the treadmill as a stand alone unit. Will do allot of work.
Can be adapted to many uses.
KeymasterHay man,
What kind of ground drive pto cart did you get? I’m jealous already.
I like the face nets, just wish they were made of some nicer material than baling twine… but ingenious Donn, nonetheless… the twine is treated, but you know all that. Some softer cotton stuff could be impregnated with nice natural repellents and you could color coordinate easier…
I killed a big black horse fly on a horse today that looked like it would have made a nice bass fishing lure…huge.
Jason
KeymasterI think the animals foot print is going to mash some grass down and make it hard to mow. Maybe put a system together where the animal or animals push it through the rows instead of pulling it. Maybe like a buck rake or Amish snowplow.
Of course they are already pushing against a collar or yoke.
Just thinking, good idea indeed, this has been done with orchards for centuries.
Now if we could just get more people to lay things out on a perfect contour and still be able to work them with animals.
Jason Rutledge
KeymasterHey BeCorson,
We’ll have a few of these running at SDAD. The folks are the Weaver’s and they use them for all sorts of applications. Maybe you’d like to come down and have a look. What would you like to know about them. There contact number is:
606-787-0266
Or that is Tim Weaver’s number, the elder son of Ammon that manufactures treadmills in Liberty, Ky. He can give you the number to the shop, I can’t seem to find it at the moment.
Looking forward to seeing folks at SDAD.
Best to all,
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