[Erica Frenay]

Hi all,
Thanks again everyone for sharing your thoughts.

Carl, the dive-in-and-just-do-it approach is how we started farming. But I like Tender Soles’ addition of precaution to that equation. I do tend to be accident-prone, and the likelihood of injury seems so much greater with a draft animal than with the small animals we currently have on our farm. I do also want to have a better understanding of horse nature before I begin, especially since most of my experience thus far is with feeder animals. Forming a multi-year relationship with an animal, requiring good communication and lots of time, is a new experience for me and one I don’t want to muck up terribly (I know I will make mistakes, but I don’t want them to be of the irreversible, devastating variety).

While my time is still so totally bound up with other things this year, I will just make it a priority to squeeze in as many farm visits and draft animal events as I possibly can, and then once things shift to allow me more time on the farm in a couple years, I will really dive in and get my own team at that point. Understanding horse nature, good communication between teamster and team, and safety are at the top of my list for things to learn before getting my own team!

Thanks all,
Erica
Shelterbelt Farm

[Erica Frenay]

Hi Carl,
I live in Brooktondale, NY, near Ithaca. We have friends nearby who farm with horses, in addition to Donn, but I would love to know any folks you’re aware of within an hour’s drive of Ithaca who like to share their horsemanship and teamster skills with novices. It often feels like too much to ask busy farmers – even those I consider friends – to take on trying to teach me anything. But sometimes there are folks who are so passionate about teaching that they don’t see it as a burden at all.
Cheers,
Erica

[Erica Frenay]

Thanks so much for all the good advice!
I realized I left a really important piece of information out of my first post, which is that time is an extraordinarily limiting factor, at least for the next year. I have a part-time off-farm job, 2 young kids (one of whom I’m home with 2 days/week), I manage the farm without other help, and my husband is building our home in addition to managing his business, so I usually don’t even have weekends available as an option for learning horse skills, unless I can bring the kids along. Note that even if I was an experienced teamster, I wouldn’t be bringing horses home in this next year because I simply don’t have enough time to properly train and work them. My hope is that in the next two years a lot of things will shift for us, allowing me to have more time on the farm.

As Donn said though, even with these schedule constraints I think there are more farm visits I could be fitting in to get experience with a range of breeds doing a range of tasks.

Erika, you mentioned that many training concepts are universal across species. That resonates with me, and gives me hope. I attended the Draft Animal Powered Field Days at UMass a few summers ago, and in an oxen session the presenter talked about the concepts in training oxen, which boiled down to being patient, kind, but firm. A light went off for me – those are the same principles we apply in parenting! So I’m hopeful my time with our 2 kids has helped in some small way to prepare me to be a good teamster 🙂

We are thinking about getting a couple of beef calves this year, but this may not be the year for me to take on trying to start training them, due again to lack of time. I am, however, attending a horse/mule training day in a couple weeks at Donn’s farm, and will start looking for other opportunities this summer to attend events and interact with draft animals.

So grateful for this forum as a resource!

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