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When I back myself into a corner with my horses, it is always always accompanied by an embarassing amount of temper on my part. Usually, in retrospect, I can pinpoint a crucial moment and say, “There’s where I really screwed up.” Occasionally, however, I’m not really sure where the tipping-point was.

Sometimes I realize that I came to the job with my head on backwards that day and the horses were unable to compensate for/ignore my distraction. The worst, though, is when I feel like I’m having a great day, everyone is in synch, and a horse does something seemingly out of the blue for apparantly no other reason than to test me. The disappointment can get me pretty bent out of shape if I don’t catch it in time.

Depending on what my own mindset is like that day, what we’re doing, how the horses are feeling, what the potential consequences are, there are a number of different tacts I might take to try to get compliance. Sometimes it’s a scolding, sometimes a smack, sometimes a cajoling, sometimes a distracting ruse. Choosing the right approach for the situation can be difficult for me when I’m pissed. Hey, when you’ve got a hammer, everything’s a nail.

My smarter horses sometimes rebel when they feel insulted by what they perceive to be pointless repetition or excessive nit-picking. Of course, once I ask them to do something it would be undermining my authority to allow them to decline to obey. The obvious work-around there is to be careful what I ask for. If I ask for something repetitive in the line of work, I don’t seem to get the flak that I do if I demand a similar amount of tedium in a training situation. They feel the difference in the intent with which I approach the task and there must be an element of aimlessness to the training repetitive motions versus the ones necessary to complete a job.

I find that when I ask for something from my horses and they don’t give it to me, that I have messed up somewhere. I have missed something. I didn’t notice the subtle clue that told me the horse was getting bored or was distracted. I didn’t correct the horse earlier on some minor detail and now it has escalated. I asked for something in a way the horse did not understand. I asked for something the horse was physically incapable of doing. There’s always a reason but figuring out what it was is sometimes an exercise in futility.

Not being me and not being my animals, I don’t have any answers for the situation you found yourself in that day. I do know that when my own temper flares it always means I’ve screwed up somewhere.

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Hah, you beat me to it Mitch.

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Search Google images for “wheel hoe” and see if that looks anything like one of the things you’ve got.

Most horse-drawn walking cultivators are designed to be drawn by one horse and go down between two rows of crop, rather than straddling a row. That type of cultivator doesn’t typically have a “wheel”, per se, but more of a depth gauge that looks like a small wheel. It can be adjusted to cause the cultivator to be more aggressive or less aggressive.

When you get two horses in front of a cultivator, you can put one horse on either side of your row and cultivate to either side of the row of crop in a single pass. Cultivators that can straddle a row of crop would have two wheels to give the equipment enough clearance to pass over the crop and would also have a seat for the farmer to be aboard. Otherwise, the teamster is walking just to one side or the other of the row of crop and it’s harder to see what you’re doing and micro-manage your team if they need it.

I have seen cultivators that put a team up front and is meant to cultivate between wide-spaced row crops that sprawl a great deal once they reach maturity – melons, for example. In that instance the row of crop is not straddled. The team passes as a unit between two rows of crop and leaves a wide swath of cultivated ground behind.

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No, wait, I do remember now that I’ve seen some cultivators with a wee wheel at the front that acts as a depth limiter to keep the cultivator from burying itself. That sounds like the item with the 6″ wheel. But the 12″ wheel…. that’s bigger than any wheel I’ve seen on a horse-drawn cultivator.

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If it’s what I’m picturing… has one wheel AND some little spike-chisel things AND handles, then I don’t believe it is meant to be horsedrawn – it’s solely people-powered.

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Do the 2nd and 3rd implements have handles? Or wheels? Or neither?

Making a walking plow is tricky business. Bolting something on to a forecart is easier to kludge up but still has a number of obstacles to overcome. I think probably the most difficult one would be fabricating a way of setting your share into the ground at the beginning of your plot, then raising it at the end. I suppose you could just plow “in the round”.

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No reason they can’t do both, I’d say. Mine sure do. One of them, in fact, is one of the better riding horses I’ve had the pleasure to own. Maybe that speaks more about the type of saddle horses I’ve endured in the past, but this mare of mine is really a nice Western trail horse. She neck-reins, sidepasses, has a nice jog (when she’s in a good mood) and a decent canter. Sure-footed and has a long ground-eating stride. Not so easy to mount from the ground… but the first thing she learned, when I started riding her, was how to scootch up sideways to whatever stump, bumper, mound of dirt, fence or milk crate I was standing on. Over the years I’ve made halfhearted attempts at teaching her to kneel. She’ll go down on one knee for me but I haven’t yet gotten her to understand how to stay there for mounting.

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Don’t hook to wheels until you have a real harness, complete with britchen.

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Could be a difference in plow types used. Find out if the friend in Scotland is talking about a plow with wheels. Not a riding plow, but a plow with kind of “training wheels” up at the front.

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The ability to lift the end of the log off the ground (and the accompanying ground clearance) is part of what makes an “arch” and “arch”. The “farm style arch” you mention is just a forecart, I’d say. Be interested to see you design for an adjustable forecart that raises for hauling logs!

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Also, try to signal them to slow down *before* they actually change gait. There are little signals to watch for that will indicate that they are just about to go from a walk into a trot. If you can catch them and increase the pressure just a bit *before* they initiate the trot, you will be able to use a smaller correction than if they get all the way into a trot.

The signals to look for include a lengthening stride or a shortened one. Sometimes a clever horse will get his partner to initiate the trot and take the fall for it, simply by lengthening his stride and causing his team-mate to trot to catch up. Make sure your lines are adjusted so you are able to touch both sides of both horses’ mouths all at once. If you are losing contact with a horse, it could trigger that horse to speed up, seeking that contact.

Many driving horses have the gas pedal wired to the floor and we’re just riding the brakes with varying degrees of firmness. It is very easy to make that kind of horse hard-mouthed if you aren’t responsive with the lines.

Always being half a step behind your team is pretty much the norm when you are first learning to drive. Your mind goes a hundred places at once and it takes focus and thought to notice what you are feeling at the end of your lines and respond to it with 1/10th of a pound more pressure. Playing catch-up with the horses will cause you to have to use more force in your corrections than if you see the change coming and head it off at the pass. Eventually you will start to catch things before they are in full-swing and you will be expending less energy to accomplish the same thing.

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If your hands are going numb their mouths probably are as well, unless you are using pressure-and-release. Make sure you don’t have them reeled in constantly. They will tune you out if you are not active with the lines. It is amazing the amount of discomfort a horse can learn to withstand if it is constant and steady. Pressure-and-release will keep their attention, however. The jigging of the one horse sounds like excess energy. That could be due to nerves, excess sugar in the diet, or just a desire to get on with the program. Be active with your lines and have them pull a good solid weight till the sweat is dripping off them and they are happy to walk. A forecart alone isn’t enough to give them a good workout. Chaining a big tractor tire on behind is a great idea.

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A healthy and well-built foot does not need a shoe for support, whether the horse be light or draft. A healthy and well-built foot might need a shoe to protect the hoof from excess wear or for additional traction or in certain footings.

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The two-man approach has long been the traditional solution to this problem. Many artistic depictions of this activity show one person on the lines and one futzing with the seeder.

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That’s an easy one… first you start with two million…

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