[Gabe Ayers]

Bradley-
I have recently cut and re-adjusted my d-ring harness and Jen Judkins as well (both ordered in biothane from Meader Supply) to make the front tugs about 18″ in length. This measurement is critical to fit on that type of harness, as the d-ring should be positioned just behind the front leg, and the belly band should make contact with the back of the legs as the horse strides forward. Most harness makers with stock d-ring harnesses make the front tugs much, much too long, which places the d-ring in the middle of the flank. This adjustment will make your horse more comfortable as well as really improving the draft. Let me know if you want more details, or and check out Les Barden’s materials on d-ring harness fit – he offers a wealth of good information on this subject.
-Brad

[Gabe Ayers]

There are two fellows in Central Virginia that work oxen.

Luke Conner 804-475-6147
Bill Speiden – oxpwr@yahoo.com

Glad you are here, good luck, let us know if we can help you in any way.

Our website address is below if you are interested in looking at what we do to promote Restorative Forestry and modern animal powered techniques.

Welcome,

[Gabe Ayers]

Kevin,

I am not sure how you will get out of construction and into the woods working real horses if you don’t want to use wood in every appropriate application possible?

I suppose it comes back to the old statement about wood being our renewable resource. I believe this – if it is sourced from restorative forestry techniques.

There are many examples of timber frame structures that are hundreds of years old. There are environmentally safe ways to preserve this wood. I also am not sure what the indoor pollution you are referring to as it relates to wood either? We use and recommend a non-toxic water based polymer finish on our floors and beams.

Yep, I drive a Ford to work every day too.

If I had my wish, I would drive my animals to the neighborhood woodlots and back to the barn every day. Unfortunately we haven’t managed to access every piece of woodland in our community, yet – but we are working on it. Every piece of forest that we do get to work on by a roadside adds to the understanding that animal powered forestry is real, available and a viable option. Every clear cut is a landscape scale advertisement for the contrary.

One of the biggest problems in our area is absentee landowners that pretty much manage by neglect or doing nothing, besides posting it with No Hunting signs, so the tall tree rats (whitetail deer) can proliferate beyond sustainable numbers. They often are the know it all types that Carl mentions and therefore are the least likely clients for our services. Our farm is sadly surrounded by such a landowner. The problem in this case is that these folks have no vision, no direct heirs (children) and when they pass it is a very likely outcome that some distant relative will cash it in to the highest bidder that will probably be a developer…usually preceded by a timber sale at the highest bid which will be a large sawmill that hires conventional foresters and conventional harvesting, meaning clear cut… I didn’t just figure this all out, I have simply observed it, all to often.

I understand that the forests doesn’t need us and that in 500 years the forests may completely restore itself. But we need the forests and the forest products available without destroying the ecosystem a forest is.
Our work is definitely an alternative to conventional forest products sourcing methods. The intent of restorative forestry is to correct bad practices of the past, while addressing human needs for forest products in the present.

It is not easy work, but it is good work if you can get it and do it. It is easier than trying to convince the public that clear cutting is a good thing, glad that isn’t my job, although it was pretty much the thrust of a forestry education during my time in college… What we all actually do speaks louder than our words, written or spoken.

[Gabe Ayers]

I will attach a picture of a black locust in the Appalachians.

This is a specialty product species for us and we harvest them as individuals like every other species, looking for the worst ones first and there are indicators of low performance just like all other species.

We are looking forward to having the Traveling Woodsmen back in the Appalachians.

[Gabe Ayers]

We will be sending the speech Wendell gave at SDAD out with our electronic newsletter to the members that joined our HHFF site.

After that is sent out we will probably post it here too.

Thanks for sharing, you got to love this to do it for sure.

Sincerely,

[Gabe Ayers]

Well again I agree with Joel, logging is NOT a game, it is the second most dangerous occupation in the nation on a deaths and injury basis. I think the reason that Soren Erickson named it this from the start was because he wanted to attract young people to his training courses. Another point based on my experience of training with Soren decades ago is that the training program is about chain saw safety and skills – not “logging”. Maybe since sports are such a big part of young peoples lives, (that are physically active) this became a way of naming that training program.

Every Biological Woodsmen we have trained was a “sports” athlete on some level first. I have said for years that one needs to have the body of a tri-athlete marathoner and the environmental ethic of a radical environmentalist to be a Biological Woodsmen. That hasn’t changed.

I have also heard all these stories from all the forest interests for thirty years. There are so many conflicts of interest and compromising situations that limit the ability of private forest landowners from getting good information. This is why we concentrate our landowner education to be by conducting events like our Open Woods Days and bringing them in the forest to see the work first hand. The more educated the landowner is about the forest the more they want our services.

Landowner education has got to be more than a consulting forester’s telephone number, there just aren’t enough good ones around. This being said by someone that makes a percentage of their income as a consulting forester.

The article by McEvoy is not as bad as the crap on the NH site posted asking for comments by Mark Cowdrey recently.

What do you think of that post Carl? I think there is a deadline on responding to that bunk and wondered if anyone else was looking at it?

I think a missing ingredient in these forestry articles is the phrase “site specific”. The sites are so different that informed ground level observations cannot be replaced as a source of information and guidance for favorable treatment of the forest.

I also agree that all we can do is the best we know how and the rest will take care of itself. That is hard stuff for a beginner to grasp when they are working at this for a living. But time has proven that doing the right things will have their rewards over time, it has for Carl and for many of us.

It is very tiring battling all the conventional thinkers about forestry.

The main point folks is that there is an ongoing war for access to the resources. Our little group of animal practitioners are a threat to the conventional approach having free range in the woods everywhere. The conventional forest product industry is afraid they won’t get wood cheap forever, when in fact they are over harvesting and working themselves out of a job daily, by diluting the value of the very products they sell by putting to much of it out daily.

It is a giant leap to have consumers develop the same understanding and values for sustainably harvested wood as they do for organic food. People don’t eat wood. But the same concern will eventually be shared beneficially by the larger landscape and human needs from the forest will become understood as valuable for it’s role in the community, watershed and planets health. Those enhanced values will add to the worth of our services, but only if we continue to prove the services provide forest products without destroying what the public perceives a forest to be.

Good stuff on this thread and many others. A frequent challenge for me is to put this stuff into sound bite segments for everyday people to understand. That is not easy when the reality is very complex, but something we work on every day. It’s like: Tell me your best way to love and nurture your children, but keep it to 250 words or less….the answer is not let the schools and government raise them!

Keep up your good work folks, wish you could all be with us this weekend!

[Gabe Ayers]

There is such a wide variety of landscapes that are the working sites for this international forum membership that no blanket statements can hold true. Sorry if that was what it sounded like, it is not what I meant. We certainly know that you can’t use an arch on a slope as steep as a cows face. We also know there are lots of places that ground skidding is appropriate and in fact the only way possible.

I guess it is an admittance of laziness or maybe just a naturally evolved position of economic and personal survival that we avoid working on very steep ground. We don’t have to, so we don’t.

There was a recent time when “horse logging” was relegated to only being appropriate on very steep ground or very wet ground or hard places to work. We have come to reject this notion historically or in the last twenty years or so and in the present and future.

Our position is that animal powered extraction is the ultimate low impact overland harvesting method. So given that understanding of the practice being the best way, then why not work on the best sites? This is a luxury we have earned through the development of our practices to be proven as superior in achieving the landowner’s objectives and being within the principles of restorative/sustainable/improvement forestry.

Just like Carl, we have a waiting list of landowners far beyond our existing capacity, therefore we continue to work to train anyone seriously interested in being a Biological Woodsman. No brag, just fact.

So we are not going to work on the hard places until we have ran out of good sites to harvest that are not steep, wet, remote or of a quality to not allow enough income to support the improvement of the forested conditions post harvest.

I think a big factor in our approach is that we are trying to educate the public as to the benefits of our forestry practices and specifically educate individuals in the skills of how to do this work and the environmental, social and personal ethics of why to do it. This means we are trying to get more new young people into this as a business, culture and lifestyle. This is a hard job in any situation, but will be even harder, if not impossible, if we put them on a mountainside with marginal timber available for harvesting as the “worst first”.

I don’t think we can find folks as tough as Joel these days…although Chad Miano would probably give him a good run for his money on a mountain side.
Chad lives so deep in Appalachia that he doesn’t have much choice but work on the mountainside and skids on the ground frequently. Most level or near level ground was either created by a bulldozer or is in a flood plain in the middle of the Appalachians, not much easy land to farm or log.

I don’t want to sound arrogant about this folks, but the fact is that our intention is to work on the best sites from the onset. In the east the forestland is increasingly being owned by more people in smaller and smaller sized tracts. These tracts often have the best timber left and that is our service area. The concern these private forest landowners have for the aesthetics is our “in” to access the timber with cultural skill, not money…
(These landowners are not about money first, but the beauty of their forest first.) It is called creating “social capital” in some circles or as we think of it – making people worth money for their skills to improve the resource, not just produce/extract forest products, or provide the services the cheapest possible or to increase the profits to other stakeholders in the process.

Sincerely,

[Gabe Ayers]

I wonder if this is the same Andy Egan that used to be at W.VA. U and was a practicing horse logger many years ago? I had heard that he left WVA. and it is good to know that he is at Paul Smiths.

Thanks for posting and sharing this.

On another note, has anyone else looked into the NH site that Rick Alger posted on earlier?

[Gabe Ayers]

Hey Brian,

Great Website! Have you folks been able to source any material from animal powered practitioners – horse, mule and oxen loggers to be exact?

We find this sourcing method does have a certain appeal with some consumers. If a “source differentiated identity” is part of how the product is defined as desirable, then the more different the sourcing is the more desirable it may be to some customers. It is particularly appealing when the material may be sourced from the home site itself.

There used to be some great horse loggers in BC, including Rob Borsato and others. In fact at one time the Canadian government was supporting the training and displayed a clear preference for this technique.

Thanks for posting here and continued good luck with your good work out there.

Salute,

[Gabe Ayers]

Rod-
Sorry for that omission. Brad Johnson 802-345-7488, Randolph Center Vt

[Gabe Ayers]

Yes, that’s right. Thanks for the clarification Tim.

[Gabe Ayers]

TEOTWAWKI

Hey Phil, what does that mean?

The making of loose hay can be read about in Lynn Miller’s hay books and I bet there are folks up there that still make loose hay somewhere. There used to be some folks named Maureen Ash and Rich Purdy that farmed with Suffolk’s did some hay making. They may know someone if you can find them. They call their place Baldur Farms. Maybe a search will find them. I think there is a fellow named Charlie Kind in Wi. that works horses quite a bit.

History does repeat itself and animal power will be a part of the future, it is just a matter of time. Good idea to work towards all animal power in the future.

Enjoy yourself and limit your goals to what you can realistically accomplish.

Welcome to DAP.

Sincerely,

[Gabe Ayers]

I have a great one-horse bobsled with shafts. I could send some photos if that would be helpful.

[Gabe Ayers]

Thought I would attach this photo of our poster so you guys can see how we educate the public about our work. Everything we do is free for anyone to use that wants too. It is intended to be for the public good.

Keep up the good work there folks,

[Gabe Ayers]

The plow bottom is generally measured from the point where it enters the sod back to the heel of the bottom (on the face, opposite the land side). This measurement across the bottom tells you how large a slice the plow will remove from the land side on each pass. The larger the bottom size, the faster you work but draft on the horse increases substantially as you move up in size. I have never used anything larger than 10″ with a single horse and I would prefer to use 8″.

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