[Gabe Ayers]

Cheers to all…

[Gabe Ayers]

Hey Brian,

I would be glad to provide references for Chad Vogel that spoke with you about his farm anytime. I can do this in writing or over the phone. Thanks for your
sharing. Please call if you would like to hear my opinion and experience with this individual over the past several years…

Warm Salute,

540-651-6355

[Gabe Ayers]

Note, go to the photo page and check out the latest pull results from the billoboard photo posted earlier.

To follow up on the comment by Neil about hooking on to his double tree and finding out.

I have been pulling horses for thirty years or so and have won state fairs, county fairs and a few pulls in between over the years. So I am speaking from some considerable experience. This also means we have lost more than we have won…but still have participated and seen some of the best over the years and I started pulling for fun – with ponies…having my first team of large ponies in 1972.

Ponies – good well trained and conditioned ponies can pull three times their weight from a dead stand still on a stone boat. Horses generally can pull around twice their weight.

About the offer to hook double tree to double tree, it reminds me of street racing for title to title, winner keeps the others vehicle…. I have consistently had as good a horses as anyone I have seen out there over these years and I know there are some pony pullers in the northeast that despite what we may think of them or their methods, that pound for pound I would not hook my horses to their double tree. I wouldn’t want to loose my horses and I suspect the same result in a given circumstance would happen to anyone with a heavy horse versus the same weight in real pulling ponies….

I am with Neil though, I want to work my heavy horses for many reasons and all in all they are an easy choice for anyone doing serious consistent work in the fields or forest. Disposition is the a clear advantage for the heavy horses, not to mention the shear weight and comfort of their abilities at most task….
but overall pound for pound pulling….the ponies are stouter…. fact.

[Gabe Ayers]

I have been meaning to respond to this question of pound for pound pulling power. It is a rainy morning in Appalachia so this is the time. We will reset our team today, in the barn….

I started out pulling ponies in the early seventies. There is no question from my experience of pulling horses for about forty years now that the ponies will/can pull more pound for pound than the larger horses.

It is still a matter of conditioning, training, breed characteristics and the skill of the operator.

A real pulling horse is a matter of the heart to try by the individual be it a pony or horse.

I wanted to support this position of being a member of this culture community by posting a bill board now standing outside of a town in our region. Please excuse any unintended advertising here, but know that this cultural practice is a powerful public draw even in the south….

I can’t figure out how to do it in the body of this message as I currently don’t store any images on any server other than my PC. So go to the photo pages and take a look at the image under favorite photos….

Given the reality of working with horses in the woods daily I have settled on working heavy horses, as they can efficiently move large logs with less work by me as the person committed to animal husbandry. For start up folks or smaller operations, or folks that don’t mind the multiple hitching, the ponies could work well. They can be super athletes.

I will post a couple of other pulling photos on the photo page. I have to compress them for quick loading and acceptance on this site.

[Gabe Ayers]

Jonny,

Having been the first person to my knowledge to use the term “worst first” many years ago – in defense of the blanket accusation by conventional foresters that all horse loggers were high graders, I would submit other considerations to include what we consider restorative forestry management.

Yes “Restorative Forestry” is based upon taking the “worst first” single tree selection and the resulting development of the best species and specimens on a site specific basis informed by science and common sense.

The consideration of forest management practices for any one specific goal is denying or overlooking that the forest is a wonderful interconnected ecosystem that functions as a living interdependent system where all the parts are positively contributing to the whole of a healthy forest. This resulting condition created through active management will certainly create conditions conducive to “wildlife presence”, of all kinds, not just the deer, bear and turkey.

Your particular forest seems to be a regenerated field that once had wolf trees left as agriculture was abandoned and the natural forested conditions
regenerated itself around this residuals of the past practices. We see this in the forest all the time even in Appalachia. Usually the big old wolf trees are sitting on a rock or rock pile and were left because they were not easily mowed down or tilled in the practices of agriculture. I can imagine the pleasure of resting yourself and animals in the shade of one these when working a homestead many years ago…

It becomes a difficult decision as to when or if to harvest of cut the big wolf trees. I would suggest applying the same considerations we use in the Nature’s Tree Marking Paint indicator system fleshed out in the writing on this subject and title on our web site (address below). Since they obviously have poor form in the structure of the tree being far more limb than stem they are not growing great timber value despite their age or species. But at the same time they may be providing a great seed source for the regeneration of that species in a more natural forested spacing that will produce good timber in the future forested conditions. In Virginia the only law that applied to forestry historically was the seed tree law, which said that one mature seed bearing tree should be left per acre to help regenerate the forest. This may also be the case in Mass. We do harvest these trees when they have three or more indicators of the NTMP’s system and find that they may have a very valuable
butt cut and then a massive amount of limbs and low grade logs thereafter.
They also create a massive hole in the canopy when felled and usually create some damage to the residual regeneration when they hit the ground. They also are famous for standing up on the limbs, or would that be sitting up on the limbs and being very difficult and dangerous to get to the ground to create logs out of. It takes real skill to read the lean of these trees and equal skill to fell them where they will cause the least damage to the residual trees.

In our region these trees are often true white oak. The butts are usually great for quarter sawing highly figured wood from. The acorns are the choice mast for all wildlife, but that wildlife food will continue to be created by the seedlings, saplings and younger trees in the area that are the babies of these
big wolf trees. The amount of firewood available from one of these big old mama’s could heat a home for a year at least. Just be sure you know what you are doing when you fell it as the mechanics of that task are important to
understand to provide operator safety….

So these are a few thoughts about wolf trees. Again some landowner’s in our country have a particularly deep attraction to these old large trees for their beauty and when they do and specifically communicate that attraction to them, we simply leave them. The landowner makes the decision easy by attaching such a high culture value to an individual tree. In my own forest, they are gone….and their genetics are still present. After forty years or so of doing this work of restorative forestry we have seen this condition frequently.
I would suggest felling them in winter (leaf off) as they do provide some lesser species habitat during the growing season, such as canopy nesting migratory birds, and cavity dwellers…

The post harvest conditions rapidly (relative to the age of the wolf tree) return to a more natural well spaced and populated forest and the stumps of these old giants often grow wonderful edible mushrooms, such as chicken of the woods, hen of the woods and oyster. The very presence of these old dominants supply some unplowed (never turned) ground that could recolonize the entire forest with beneficial organisms.

The challenge is to get folks to walk through their woods in order to find the free food there….as well as be educated about what it actually is.

Good luck, enjoy your woods any way you can….

[Gabe Ayers]

It’s taken me awhile to get here but Carl mentioned this thread to me and I wanted to quickly chime in.

Raising advertising revenue is a good idea and generally how web sites such as DAP manage to survive. That said, you have a really good niche here with a growing and dedicated community of folks interested (invested, even) in the subject matter being discussed.

Adding pay-per-click links is easy enough although typically the payout on these is pennies at best and don’t typically pay until a $100 value is reached. The most accessible model for this is Google AdSense and although I use this on a number of my own sites I don’t think this is the best option for DAP.

I would think that a yearly subscription model to home page ads or “sponsorships” would be the best value for both DAP and advertisers alike. Additionally it is possible to set up forum-specific sponsorships.

Whatever model is decided upon I will help Carl set it up on the site.

[Gabe Ayers]

Old Kat,

I am not interested in promoting line breeding as a principle of animal husbandry in the modern world, but I do have some experience with related horses being breed to each other.

When I first became interested in Suffolk horses, I was even poorer than I am now (1978). At that time there was a grading up program through the Suffolk
Association where a mare of like color and conformation could be bred to a registered Suffolk stallion and all females could be registered as percentage horses starting as 1/2, then bred to another registered Suffolk stallion and the female offspring registered as 3/4, then again with the females registers as full bred. This is how I got started because I happen to have an old family connection with the fellow that ran the killer barn that once slaughtered horses for mostly shipment of horse meat to Europe. This fellow had traded with my grandfather throughout my childhood and I happened to meet his
son after both our parental figures had passed on. He allowed me to collect some chestnut mares by separating them from the slaughter line and allowing me to have my pick. This is what I did to establish a cheap string of mares to start our program. I bought/swapped for a stud colt from an Amish that had bred the colt by crossing a sire back on a daughter, generally because he had not other sires available. This was the first Suffolk I owned and he was intended to be crossed on the mares from the killer barn that I had selected for conformation and color (chestnut). This horse was smaller than some, which I think may be a problem with breeding related horses. They can become diminutive or smaller. This first Suffolk colt (Samson) crossed very well on unrelated mares and produced horses that we much larger than him and were very true to type, color and maybe most important in this day and age disposition. I only kept mares from him and gelded every male and never sold a stallion from Samson. Of course as my luck had it, the Suffolk Association quit the grading up program about the time my stud colt and string of killer mares became of a productive age. So I eventually had to acquire registered Suffolk mares to keep the program going in order to keep the value of the offspring of a higher value for sale off the farm. I eventually got rid of all my killer mares and kept female offspring of the line bred or inbred stallion. In the end of the grading up program I think there were less than twenty percentage mares infused into the registered Suffolk bloodlines.

Since that time I have crossed all my mares with unrelated stallions and have kept a couple of colts entire and moved them into the market, that includes successful sires that have went all over the country, just a few, maybe three… These horses all were similar type, being short coupled, dark solid red and kind, willing workers that were easy to train and use.

I did have an accidental breeding of two half brother and sister pair a few years ago. This means the deer ran through the stallions electric fence while I was off the farm, out of town and the stallion joined the herd where all was fair game and he bred one of his half sisters (same sire for both). The offspring of this cross was an extremely common type Suffolk, being dark chestnut and short coupled, blocky animal, again that was extremely easy to work with. However the female that resulted from this line breeding is smaller than her herd mates from unrelated matings. She is sweet and beautiful, but is smaller. So I think that may be an issue with line breeding although this cross representing both parents only having half of the same blood through the having the same sire.

Since we now have DNA and blood typing it would seem that we could evolve our horses based on science of inter breed hybrids or breeding horses within a
traceable bloodline to horses that are not closely related at all, say third cousins. This is what we are basically doing in some cases now. I haven’t had a foal of this crossing yet, but will this spring. One of our current sires is a third cousin on the dams side with a couple of mares we bred him with. It will be interesting to see the results.

Now, we do have a local facility that collects and ships fresh semen all over the world. We advertise this on the Suffolk Association site and have not had a single taker thus far. We just charge the same fee for the stud service and let the rest of the cost be a matter between the A.I. lab and the customer.
I think it is very expensive for someone that just wants a great work horse.
I know artificial insemination has been used on mares in England from American sires and vice versa.

Frankly at this point I am charging the same breeding fees as twenty years ago and don’t have that many outside mares. Folks seem to want to bred there mares for less than $500.00 and that is not enough to make keeping a stallion worth it unless the horse works right along with all the others on the place. This is what we do and that makes the horse truly proven as a sire.

When taught animal husbandry in college the order of concern was, conformation, procreation and disposition. Today since most folks don’t work them enough to wear them out it seems that disposition may be more important as the first concern, then conformation and procreation or reproduction. If you can’t get along with them you aren’t going to work them no matter what they look like or how they are built.

These are just some thoughts from our experience. Hope it is enjoyable reading for anyone thinking of breeding work horses. It is a matter of doing the best we can with what we have. This particular breed is hard to out cross within the registry but it can be done with careful attention to the bloodlines and some importation of new blood into your breeding program every few years or so. There are some really good breeders of Suffolks and I think the president of the ASHA up in NH has some great stock. I wonder if he is on this site? John Hammond, are you here?

Good post Old Kat, keep us up with what you are doing, because the future could include transportation cost that prohibit the choice of distant sires. Maybe A.I. could be an alternative, but it isn’t cheap either.

The point is to work the horses in the settings that presents the culture as a superior practice and therefore making them worth more to anyone. That is our goal and approach in the practice of restorative forestry.

[Gabe Ayers]

We have cut timber on the “public land” in the past, having harvested around a half million feet in the Jefferson National Forest in Virginia.

One would think this would be a great opportunity to apply the sensitive services of animal powered forest management or at least low impact extraction.

Our experience is based upon a relationship with the timber management person that had an open mind about the extraction component of this work. That open mind is usually based upon some experience by the person in charge based upon seeing the results of a skilled practitioners of modern animal powered extraction. Or as Simon suggests, it would seem that the manager would choose animal power for the right reasons.

In our case that was the basis and justification of this “experiment”. The sites we harvested were visually sensitive, meaning that the units were at a crossroads where two public roads intersected in the national forest and the public was able to see the forestry practiced for a considerable distance around these public roads, again meaning state roads and not forest service roads. The goal was to harvest timber without provoking environmentalist to protest the timber harvesting. Again the reason this happened was because of the open mindedness of the timber management person.

We successfully fulfilled our contracts on these sites and were happy with the results of the work and the economics of our involvement. There are many details that won’t be shared at this point in this post. But the point is that we did good work and made fair money at the work. The USFS did some research in the course of this work, including learning how much labor was involved to
lop and scatter the laps, tops and debris resulting from the harvest. We were able to show the USFS that this extra work that was intended to improve the visual appearance of the post harvest conditions was a valuable service to achieve the desired objectives of the timber sale. Those objectives were, simply to harvest trees and not provoke protest. All in all this was done in the simplest sense.

However there were problems that we encountered over the course of these harvesting contracts or timber sales. The first was that we had no control over the silviculture of this work. The selection was based upon a diameter limit cut, where only the timber over a certain diameter at breast height were cut. This made the job a high grade essentially and was not what we wanted to do in the long run. The other bad point for us was that we weren’t allowed to do any timber stand improvement throughout the process, meaning allot of low grade material was just left standing after the harvest and we weren’t allowed to cut and extract or just cut and leave it lay, so the job was not an improvement cut in the eyes of a truly sustainable forester or knowledgeable
observer. So this post harvest condition put our work in a bad light to anyone that really knew what they were looking at.

This lead to the eventual decision to not cut timber on public land after that experience. This was an ethical decision, not an economic one. We definitely made fair money on the deal because we were able to negotiate the stumpage price and allow reduced cost to offset the lopping and scattering we did for the visual appearance of the post harvest forest. However it put our work in the bad light of just being a high grade, which was an untenable position that we came to reject as a way to make a place in the future for animal powered forestry to be truly sustainable. This is exactly why we switched to working on private forestland in order to have control over the silviculture and leave the forest in an improved condition that was available to our practitioners for frequent short rotation harvest along the lines of restorative forestry as defined by our group today.

My point is that we need to be aware of what the public forester wants us to do. Don’t allow any forester to reduce your services to contract harvesting alone. We can’t compete with machines and in fact are not interested in competing with machines. We (HHFF) prefer to support informed practitioners and promote their independence as providers of superior services that develop long term relationships with forest landowners. This doesn’t mean that one can’t work with public land, it just means that you should be aware of what you are doing before being engaged in some activity that will later be turned around and used to dismiss the culture of animal powered techniques when observation of the results suggesting that there is “no difference” in the
finished product of a harvesting site. This is what we experienced when we worked on the public and we will not be reduced to “no difference” again, by allowing someone else to control the silviculture…..

I hope this makes some sense to anyone interested in working in the woods with their animals. Maybe there will be some comments that will allow further discussion of this issue of horse loggers working on public land…..

I have no doubt that any public forester in the NE could find plenty of horse loggers. I suspect there are more there than any other part of the country.

[Gabe Ayers]

I mailed my $20.00 bucks today. Money well spent given the hard earned dollar that we generate in the woods daily, practicing restorative forestry and the fact that each dollar seems to be worth less every day and this site is a bargain.

We are a small, often isolated community of interest. I think we need each other more than we know and are all more alike than different.

Hope you can keep it all going Carl and Lisa.

Hopefully a few others will send along a little money for the webmaster services also.

[Gabe Ayers]

Carl,

I would resubmit my thought about publishing some of the more informative and constructive threads on this great board in any of the Draft Animal Pubs that would pay a small fee for them, similar to the fees they pay for an article submitted.

A normal article (say two pages of text) can pay about $125.00 so if you put one in each quarter or possibly even more often for a magazine that published bi-monthly – that could generate $500.00 which would help with the cost of DAP site.

One thing for sure is that this site is a public service to the community of interest in Draft Animal Power and should be supported by that same community if possible.

However as we experience operating a 501c3 non-profit serving the public good through a small community of interest (numbers wise) there is not allot of extra money available from that community. I am sure you experience this personally being truly a member of this community and living the sustainable lifestyle you and your family do.

So that is just a suggestion. I invite the use of anything I contribute to DAP being used to support the site through the printed media.

I am not sure how one could collect data about how many readers of the printed media don’t have computers to access this site, but I suspect there are more out there than one would think. Many people don’t have a computer for all sorts of reasons, but they would like to read the discussions on this forum. Most of the print media is hungry for articles and information so maybe there is a match there.

If just collecting random threads from a public forum doesn’t seem appropriate maybe you could conduct online interviews with individuals that frequently contribute to this site in such a way that the responses are not a matter of public forum and then offer them to the printed media as “first run” words on the issues of this community of interest. I would gladly participate in such a
discussion group in support of this site.

I can’t respond to this question without expressing a sincere appreciation for what you and Lisa have done with your wonderful event in the northeast and the creation of this site to be available to the world. This small effort is a great one and enjoyed by many folks at all sorts of levels. One amazing thing is that this is an unedited site that for the most part has been very civil and
constructive in the development of the culture of animal power in the modern world. From your position as host – this is a brave expedition into the unknown every day you click on DAP. Your bravery and determination is to the benefit of everyone to the degree they understand the culture of modern Draft Animal Power.

We at Healing Harvest Forest Foundation thank you for your efforts, they are instructive, educational and inspirational. Hopefully you can figure out a way to keep it going without flashing ads, or the typical distractive aspects of the internet.

It is a refreshing site in that regard and hopefully it will continue to grow to serve as a path on the information highway that has animal tracks along the way. If there are any droppings along the way some enterprising farmer has appropriately scooped them up and added them to the compost pile of
thought….

Thanks Carl and Lisa.

Warm Salute,

[Gabe Ayers]

Bret,

What is your draft animal power story?

[Gabe Ayers]

Jennifer,

I am not sure how you could come up with a more prickly subject than Buckthorns. I am not exactly sure what species that is, but I suspect it is what we call whitethorn or wild quince, down here. They have long thorns and are very aggressive when growing in the understory. We do quite a bit of timber stand improvement as part of our work of restorative forestry and cut many of these alien invasive shrubs.

I admit that I am not a botanist and in fact most of my species identification is economically informed. In other words if we can make any money from a species we can identify it or if it stops us from making money from our attempts of man to age the forest we usually know what it is.

Many woody botanical species in the central Appalachians are not successful regenerating after simply cutting low because of the intense white tail deer browsing. We have so many deer that hardly anything that sprouts from cutting gets by without serious browsing in this area. Of course this could be a good time to bring up how good venison is for tacos and spaghetti.

We also are strickly organic in principle and practice, but there are exceptions. We have many invasive botanicals in Virginia. Some are so aggressive (like Alanthus) that we use some spot applications of herbicide on the stumps of these when they are cut out of the forest. We use a dishwashing liquid container and just apply it to the cut stub.

We are currently working with a landowner that has made it a mission to eradicate Alanthus by treating the smaller ones with a machete and spray bottle so they don’t sprout back from the stumps. He puts little cuts in the bark and sprays it with the herbicide in the little cuts. It is a shame that we have gotten our natural ecosystem so invaded, but we have and will have to continue to address it in order to return the forest to a natural population of native vegetation.

I really don’t have any experience with running goats in the woods, but there is much work going on all over the country using grazing and browsing animals to combat these plants.

This probably isn’t much help. But the whitethorns here have big prickly thorns that are dangerous and surely displace the regeneration of the forest in native species. I once had a mare that lost an eye to one of these thorns, so I don’t like them and cut them everywhere we see them, just as a matter of course in practicing timber stand improvement while harvesting worst first dominants.

Maybe someone else will have more information, experience, knowledge and recommendations.

[Gabe Ayers]

Hey Tina,

Steve had a twin, Mike Bowers who lives here in southwest Virginia. He is also a very good stockman. I have met and seen Steve speak a couple of times at HPD events and his techniques were great. We hope Steve’s son and wife continue his work successfully. I have also met Pat at an event several years ago and was included in a film a while back, called “In the Company of Horses” along with him and Monty Roberts.

So we have been doing similar natural horsemanship things as these horseman for a while now. We teach similar approaches in our private instruction and the Biological Woodsmen training through the HHFF mentor/apprentice program.

It would be good to buy the books and media of Steve’s while they are available.

We will probably offer another private instructional course in the spring of 09.

I am sure there are other’s that practice and teach natural horsemanship throughout the country.

[Gabe Ayers]

Thanks Iron Rose, feeding less is easy when you don’t have much money to buy feed.

The reviews or responses so far are positive. It is encouraging to hear and we are off to work on the next segment.

[Gabe Ayers]

Bret,

Please don’t feel insulted, I never used the word evil, those quote marks are not quoting me as I recall.

As a public person, it wouldn’t seem wise of me to judge someone by calling them evil.

Rush is probably already perpetually nervous from all the pills he’s popped over the years. I’m not nervous, I enjoy the exchange.

Conservation is not preservation. Conservatives, generally are not about conserving. There are exceptions of course.

Preservation as the environmental folks promote or advocate for probably isn’t actually even preservation. It is just keeping humans out of the direct contact with the natural world for a while. But that is impossible as we know from all the influences we have had before, plus most of the wilderness set aside is low quality sites from a forestry perspective so it may not be the best forest we could have naturally anyway.

I would submit that having a control where we do nothing is the most important and appropriate classroom to learn from nature. All experiments need a control to compare the results of other treatments. Wilderness or preservation of land type efforts could be that.

Hey man, I’m not looking down my nose at anyone, maybe beyond my nose and willing to share that for what it is worth.

Everyone is free to think what they want about it. Since the opinion is free, it may be worth what it cost…

Maybe you will watch the RFD-TV deal and give us your critique of that media. All opinions appreciated and respected.

Tell us about your animal powered story.

[Author]

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