[Matthew]

Horses were and still are in some places wild animals. They were not ment to carry a rider, jump over things, pull a plow. They also were not ment to live in a confinement and have thair feed brought to them. You can pretty mutch find any problem with a horse and blame it on man. I love horses and don’t get me wrong I am not bashing horse owners but foot problems, collic, founder, dental problems and probably a hundred more can be blamed on the fact that we keep horses as domesticated animals. In the wild horses feet ware at the same rate they grow, it is when we use horses for work or riding that they need shoes a wild horses feet dont ware out because he is not working, walking on pavement or carring a 200 pound man on his back. A wild horse will not collic or founder because he is eating a diet of pour wild grasses and during most of the year probably has all he can do to keep his belly full. Problems assosiated with older horses are simply explained by a wild horse would not live as long as a horse that has a shelter and all his meals brought to his stall. I am not a expert on the life span of a wild horse but I dont think thair are to many 30 year old wild horses. If your teeth go you can’t get the proper nutrents and probably dont make it through the winter. The point I am making is once you get away from the wild natrual animal part of the horse you can have problems, trying to keep a horse in his natural state or as close as your situation will allow you to is your best bet. If you need your horse in shoes than that is what you must do to keep thair feet in good shape or provide traction. But shooeing to make a horse have a certan gait or look like he has a huge foot is in my opinion stupid and asking for trouble. I went to horse shoeing school after high school and was tought to trim all horses to thair natural angle, the angle of thair sholder should be the same angle as the hoof. If you take off to mutch heal they will be to shallow and will pull and strech thair tendons, leave to mutch heel and they will be at to steep of a angle. I personaly always take as mutch toe off as I can it eases break over and long toes do more harm than short toes. Alot of horses grow all toe and no heels so by the next trim they are triping on thair long toes. In shoeing school we worked on a founderd horse that had a coffin bone about to go through his sole and could hardly walk, we put a regular shoe on backwards so the open part was open towards the toe and rasped as mutch toe off as we could to ease the preshure of the break over the horse could walk better just after the shooeing. This is all just my opinion I would keep all horses as (natural) as your situation allows, nothing drives me more nuts than to see a horse with a soaking wet blankit half falling off because it is so waterloged on a 50 degree day in november because the owner is convinced the horse is freezing to death.

[Matthew]

I have looked a little online and find quite a bit about harvisting ice with horses and hand tools but all I see are ice plows nothing like what I have. The closest I have found is a picture of a ice plow with a guide off set the plow to keep the size blocks uniform. I had a change of heart after reading some of the other coments and I have tucked the scoring plow away in a shed untill I can find someone who can use this or I get the balls to work a team on a frozen lake.:eek: Check out this picture I found online you can see the calked shoes, the ropes I am gessing is incase the team falls in. The harness is missing a few parts the back pad is missing and belly band is just hanging between the horses legs. I wounder if this was done to get the harness off in a hurry if the team went through the ice or was the harness just junk?

http://drc.ohiolink.edu/bitstream/handle/2374.OX/1379/57.41.P11613790.jpg?sequence=2

[Matthew]

Nice pic thank god for the invention of the chain saw. It is amazing what a horse can pull on snow. I like the part whair the sasquach helps stack wood.:D

[Matthew]

We are under a watch also in connecticut. The state has traps set out with decaying ash wood as bait. So far the traps have been empty. I also saw a article about the ash borer titled Ash The Next Chestnut? Kinda scarry if you ask me.

[Matthew]

When I was a teenager I worked for a carpenter building houses, he used a guy for his site work who had a heavy maine accent. The guy with the accent was graiding with a dozzer and he yelled to me ( Hey move the top!) me being a good worker ran right over to move the top. Looking around and seeing no top I said the top of what? He yelled the top! I again said the top of what? he again said the top! In fustration to find this top I again asked what top? He then yelled quite mad the fu@#en blue top, I now knew he wanted a blue TARP moved.:D

[Matthew]

That was awsome I could just picture my self sitting in that shop watching ben build that sled. We loose a little bit of history each day.

[Matthew]

Carl I really like that idea of the mower vs chiping or burning, stumping, and dozing. Do you worry about the stumps leaving sink holes in the future? I know they take a real long time to rot. I have dug up hardwood stumps 15 years old and were totaly intact. I thought of clearing land by cutting my stumps low and treating the stump with herbiside but didn’t want to see a animal break a leg in a hole years down the road. Stumps are a pain in the but you end up with a hole three times the size of the stump and bring up the crappy sub soil to the top. Do you plan on putting lime on the soil I would think old forest soil would be very acidic. I have a lot of land I want to make into pasture, it sure is a lot of work to go from forest to fenced pasture. Nice job with the mower the hourly rate must be cheeper than a exavator and dozzer together with paying to move two machines.

[Matthew]

The notched harrow blades work well. My harrow is a dubble gang with notched blades in the front and smooth round blades in the rear. The front ones can be angled in the more the v the deeper it digs in. The key is the weight. I have tried rocks, cinder blocks, old propaine tanks filled with water, the best is sand bags they dont move.

[Matthew]

Wow we don’t have any of those in Connecticut. I guess a few of those in your garden would be a organic way to control deer.

[Matthew]

The man who taught me about horses worked in the woods in Maine. They use to cut some saw logs but most of the wood was small. They would cut 4 foot hardwood pulp and softwood pulp, 50 inch bolt wood I think was ether a clear wood for floring or something else I can’t remember but thair good red oak was sold for building lobster traps.( Or lobstah depending if you are from Maine) They would cut wood in figure eights in the woods then go in with a four wheel wagon in the summer ,spring and fall and a sled in the winter. They would use the figure 8 because they could easaly carry the wood to the wagon or sled and go through the 8 and be turned around to go back to the landing. If you have ever seen the woods in northern maine you would understand how this would work well it is so thick you couldn’t throw a baseball ten feet. When they would get back to thair truck in the landing they would sort thair wood or load it on the truck in 1 cord stacks with a cable looped around the wood and a crane would off load them at the mill. I think they would load 4 or 6 cords on the truck. In the winter they would go into the swamps when they froze and cut white ceader with the same figure 8 and a sled. The sled had heavy bunks with chains that criss crossed the back of the front bunks to the front of the rear bunks to help it steer sharper. I remember they would put the sled on blocks every night so it wouldn’t freeze to the ground. After a snow someone would have to take the team and sled over the woods roads and doing this all winter would pack the snow so well the team would stay on the frozen packed road and not break through. These guys use to haul thair horses backwards on a open rack body truck, they would find a bank, back up to it and load the horses. I rember one old timer use to put a feed bag on the horses when it was extremly cold so they would breath warmer air on the back of the truck. On real cold days he said the horses would put thair heads down for the ride. Those men were tough and thair horses even tougher.

[Matthew]

@mitchmaine 18880 wrote:

andy, you can walk that perimeter and leave your own mark, too. deer don’t like people anymore than they like dogs.

mitch

If you do this walk backwards when peeing so you dont get your shoes.:D

I have heard human hair from a barber shop is supost to work, I couldn’t tell you if it works. I think a electric fence is the only way to keep them out, it is the cheepest and most efective fence. You dont need posts that close together but you do need some hight so they cant jump the fence. Orchards by me use electric fence on a inward slant so they can’t jump over. Just last week my wife said look there are two deer in our pasture, I watched them walk through a 4 stran barbed wire fence with wire 12 inches apart like it wasen’t even there. They just steped through and didn’t even slow them down.

I planted three acres of pumpkins a few years ago and the deer destroyed them they ate some took bites out of others (can’t sell with chunck missing) and roled others with thair hoofs killing the vine.

[Matthew]

Carl I agree with you 100% and I did not intend for some one to go out and buy a team and expect the team to teach them to harness hitch and drive. I do think you need to work hands on with a mentor with or with out your own team to practice with at home. The main point I am tring to make is learning to be a teamster is the most important part of working animals. You just have to understand the way they think, act and react. That in my opinion cant be learned from a book it can only be lerarned from spending time with the animals. A book might show you how a harness is supost to be put on a horse but will not prepare you for putting a collar over a horses head that has never had it done before. You can sit on a wagon yell gee and haw pull the lines right and left but that dose not make you a teamster a monkey could probably be trained to do this you need to understand the animal you are working. I was in my buddys barn the other morning at morning milking, his father is in the prosess of selling the development rights to the state, wen a surveyior came in waving a roled up set of maps over his head. Needless to say he had never been around cows and thare was quite the comotion in the barn that morning.

[Matthew]

@dlskidmore 18833 wrote:

An animal will never surpass the abilities of the handler.

Never under estamate the intelligence of a animal. A well broke team will teach you more in a day than you could learn in a year reading books and talking to people. Working animals does not require a PH.D, more important than learning what to do with animals is learning what not to do. You need to think how that animal is thinking and as a teamster see a situation before it is a problem. A horse I use to drive was a good horse he was not a horse for a green teamster but most of the things that would excite him were predictable crossing a muddy spot in a field a catch bason on the road the key to keeping him quiet was to see something that got him excited be for he did and get him up on the bit. If you drove with a slacked line and he got a few steps ahead of you you might have a run away. I have also met a teamster that loved horses but horses didn’t love him he had no sence and it showed. He could not get horses to do anything he wanted and he would blame the horse not himself.

[Matthew]

I don’t know if the seeds have a coating of some type on them. I know corn silage seed is coated with a pink coating I am not shure if there is a fertilizer in the coating I do know thair is something for pest control (crows) When I was a kid people would add a black dust to the hoppers on the planter that stuff was to keep the crows off the young corn.

[Matthew]

This one’s for you mitch. 🙂

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyZXnpO8Jew

[Author]

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