hey dont forget about the farm progress days

[lancek]

Hey guys, big week end this week with the farm progress days in Odon Indiana plenty of logging and plowing going on come on down and join us july 3rd and 4th ! there will also be plenty of seminares on horse health and training and all sorts of house stuff.If you want to see the web site just type in farm progress days in Odon Indiana, hope to see you there Ill be the one that looks like the south end of a north bound belgin HA HA
My wife just agreed with me boy that hurts

[Jean]

I will be there with my DAP T-shirt on. Finally made it to IN today. Found the field and our hotel room. Feels good to have made it. I will let you all know how it was.

Jean

[lancek]

hey jean hope you get this i will be there tomarow will be wearing a red raceing shrit and a stilh hat with ducks and hunting scene on it I just talked to ronnie taylor from tennessee and he said he will be there to we should be buy the logging section Tim

[lancek]

Boy what a day,just got back from HPO and what a show! Couldnt belive the amount of people there , they must of had 20000 people there [just a estament so dont hold me to it] but anyways there was a crowd!
In fact I think that was a problem trying to see and here even here the seminars was a chalange they held most of them in the food tent and all the seats were taken by people that were eatingand you couldnt barly here anybody because of the noise ! I was allso not very inpressed with the logging demenstrations But all the rest of the show was great lots of gear and lots of wonderfull horses. To gean and ron looked for you every where but to no avail was realy looking forward to meeting you guys, maybe we can make it to the southeren draft horse show look out jason here we come!!

[Jean]

There was a crowd for sure. I watched the whole Doc Hammell show, but it was hard to hear him. Why dont they use wireless mics, so all sides can hear. We watched a lot of the haying and got down to the logging thing too late, nothing was happening.

I did get a team harness for my moms minis.

It was worth staying to watch the breed parade and the crazy quarterhorses pulling the stage coach.

All in all it was a great day.

Jean

[Gabe Ayers]

Lance and All,

Do come on down to SDAD, the logging will be state of the art and it will actually happen in the woods….on a ridge overlooking the fields and campground and arena. That was a prerequisite for us. One well known
southern Brabant guy said some folks thought the entire event was going to be a logging demonstration with a little farming on the side. There is a tendency for southerner’s to pick on each other as an expression of affirmation.. shinks call it “southern pseudo hostility”. I don’t think it will just be a logging demonstration, but since we are providing the logging part, it will be comprehensive. We will have a band sawmill processing the material on site. There will be plenty of field work too, just not a bunch of motorized forecarts and multiple hitches. We need new people in this community of interest and they aren’t going to get started with multiple hitches.

I am sure we won’t have as many horses and mules or Amish vendor’s but it will be a good event for a start up.

We will pull horses a little on one evening, haven’t decided which yet… probably the first night, Friday the 18th.

Those are good suggestions to have wireless mic’s on the presenters and demonstrators. HPD certainly shouldn’t have an economic challenge to afford that kind of technology to increase the quality of the experience for the spectator, which of course is who the whole thing is about….We are researching how to do that technology economically, hopefully enough folks with show up to help pay for it….

We look forward to meeting lots of folks there. It may be a new approach to have more smaller regional gatherings to develop this culture and community of interest. That is indeed our intention with SDAD and I am sure that NEAPFD is the same. Go to all of them if you can.

Salute,

[Carl Russell]

Just to pitch in here. SDAD sounds great. I think it is important to see the difference between demonstrations like HPD where the organizers don’t particularly care whether or not the spectators are urbanites, or serious learners.

We at NEAPFD have found that although we won’t turn away the money of sightseers, we have purposefully tried to target people with serious interest, which immediately reduces the crowd. In this way we have structured our workshops and demonstrations to be more personally interactive, on the one hand requiring people to take more initiative in finding out what they want to learn, but on the other hand, reducing the need for loud speakers etc.

There is always someone who can’t hear, or missed the last point, so we have decided to make sure there are several facilitators both in the woods and in the fields to keep an eye on the spectators to make sure everyone is getting the exposure they want.

Sound, for all those spectators who can’t hear, is REALLY expensive, and unless there are numerous speakers mounted high in the air, it is often ineffective, so from the standpoint of organizers unless there is substantial sponsorship to support it, gate fees are too unpredictable to make it a worthwhile expenditure.

My solution, have on-going working demos (3-5 hrs) so people can cycle through, create information-rich presentations that will “speak” to the serious student, over the head of spectators, get sponsorship, and set the gate fee high enough that gawkers won’t waste the money.

Carl

[lancek]

Thank Carl and Jason I appreiate the invites and I hope to attened both, But with the industry he way it is Im not sure that I can get to vermount allthouh its been to long since I have been back there .I want to take my kids back to sterling to see how things have progress there! And as far as the price of addmision we were told that enterance was free and then when we got there it cost us $80.00 that would;nt have been to bad if we had had more instrucional corses!

[lancek]

And Carl if I may, I understand that this web site started out as a colaberation of folks in the north east but with the amount of indaveduals that repesent other states and countries maybe setting up local chapters would help permote are way of life and create more lerning oppertonitys out here!

[Gabe Ayers]

Wow – 80.00 for how many folks Lance?

I am not sure how much instruction will go on at SDAD as much as demonstration.

The workshop idea/approach is great and will definitely attract folks interested in the focus of the workshop. Will there be a separate charge for the workshops Carl?

Can you tell we are still planning?

It will be fun for sure.

I have heard and read that HPD was over whelming crowd sizes….What about it Lance, was it crowded?

[lancek]

Well jason that was $80.00 for six of us! And yes I dont think my estmate of 20,000 is unrealestic, the crowed that was wacthing the field work was the whole leagth of the field and at least 12 feet wide on both sides, and of corse thats not counting the rest that was at the other attactions!And as I said the noise that was in the tents was the main reason people couldnt here I did not go to day because we had a all day rain and I bet the people that did sure were miserable and where they had people parked I bet they had to use the teams to get folks cars out!

[Jean]

The tickets to get into HPD were 8.00 each, not 80.00 each.

The food was cheap and plenty. Not a lot of choices, but what you got I thought was good.

The events under the tents were very loud because there were too many things going on at once, so you heard too much murmer for the people eating and chatting, or the saws that were running some sign making thing.

For the outside demos they used an auction truck that did have a loud speaker system on it, and they drove around and talked about what was happening. If you wanted to hear him, you could get close enough to listen. They used the same truck for the annoucements during the breed parade.

I have lots of pictures (200 +), plus videos if anybody would like to see some, I would be happy to post them.

I would guess that the amish, menninates, and quakers made up 80% of the crowd on Friday. We did not go back on Saturday.

Jean

[Carl Russell]

Biological Woodsman;9832 wrote:

…I am not sure how much instruction will go on at SDAD as much as demonstration.

The workshop idea/approach is great and will definitely attract folks interested in the focus of the workshop. Will there be a separate charge for the workshops Carl?

Can you tell we are still planning?…..

At NEAPFD we are not on a mission to convince anyone to try using draft animals, so outright demonstration has very little purpose. Our goal is to expand the opportunities for people who have an interest, or even experience, to connect with resources that will advance their endeavors. With that in mind we try to make sure that every demonstration is as much about the details of making the work work, as about the sight of animals working.

We are constantly getting negative feedback about how some spectators didn’t have places to sit, or had difficulty understanding what was going on, but truthfully we never expected someone to come to our woodland demo that wasn’t physically and mentally able to actually perform the work themselves. I am not trying exclude these people, but this is not the emphasis of NEAPFD. There are other fairs and expos and the like for people to get their feel-good animal experiences.

But, we have learned that as event organizers we need to understand that we will attract people who have needs that we never intended to have to deal with, and we are trying to do whatever we can to either inform them up-front, or have something to offer them somewhere at the event so that every body can get what they came for.

We do not charge extra for workshops, just one gate fee, although this year we will have half-day and full day rates so that we can offer more intensive 3-hour workshops Sat AM giving people who want that exposure the chance to come early.

We also try to make out exhibitors, resource people, and swap meet be important enough that folks will have interest in what is offered.

As far as field demos, plowing, hitching, mowing, or skidding logs all involve so many details extraneous to the animals that we feel that the demonstrations have to be set up in such a way to give attendees the chance to interact with the teamsters, including sessions where presentors will take some time to explain why they are doing, what they are doing, the way they are doing it.

One thing that I have learned about being an event organizer is to clearly define the goal that you are aiming for, and adhere to that. It can be very difficult to translate to more than a thousand people the exact details of what that goal means to you. You will always get feed-back that your event didn’t meet the interests of some, and that is often because that person didn’t understand the event, but rather went looking for what they thought the event should have been about. By being clear about your own goals then you will know that you did as good a job as you could to meet those goals, and you will know which feed-back to take seriously, and which to appreciate for what it is.

Gate fee is a very difficult part. I take seriously people’s concerns about ticket cost, but I also know what the expenses can be, and when a hurricane blows up the eastern seaboard three days before your outdoor event, no amount of good intentions is going to pay everybody you promised money to. This is why Lisa and I have spent so much time during the remainder of the year drumming up sponsorship. Without sponsors, and VOLINTEERS, there is no way that anybody can make the gate fee affordable.

Carl

[Mark Cowdrey]

I went out to Indiana as a vendor, demo-ing & pitching my PiggyBack FireWood Arch. Everyone I dealt with was helpful & supportive, particularly Equipment organizer Ben Graber and the announcer & teamster for the logging demos. As I understand it, for whatever reason other arch manufacturers were not able to attend. The folks running the “logging” demos did the best they could to fill in with the material they had. The lack of other arches gave quite a bit of focus to mine, which went well I believe, even though I would have preferred to have seen it demonstrated in a comparative situation.

All of the folks at Pioneer were very helpful, letting me use 2 of their forecarts to demo & showcase my arch.

I got a lot of positive feedback but brought home the three I hauled out. I’m not sure where I will go with it from here. I may yet get some orders out of the exposure I got last weekend.

I was fortunate to be set up in the booth adjacent to Doc Hammill’s and enjoyed visiting with him & his associates. I saw part of his second round pen session with a young mare and was impressed at the way he proceeded at the pace he thought was beneficial to the horse regardless of the clock.

It is unfortunate that we got washed out most of Saturday, but all of us involved with APFD know that issue.

One of the most impressive pieces of equipment was an advanced prototype of a new ground drive PTO forecart by I&J. This is heavier & was demo-ed with a 9′ haybine. The four horses (good sized Belgians)on it were working but not excessively. The power transmission started essentially immediately when the cart did. Projected price $3800. Very impressive. The 4 horse power by Athens with a rope & pulley wiffle-tree set up was also well thought out, designed & executed. They also had several one horse powers set up operating a variety of machines.

All in all it was a good trip. Next year will be in Topeka, Indiana, a little east of South Bend.

[lancek]

Well then I guess I got took by someone because I paid $80.00 for six people at the gate ! And I uderstand that large cost are assoeated with this type of opperation that was why I didnt hesatate to pay when asked, all I am saying is that I dont think that they antesapated the crowds that they got !but I was a little disapointed that there wasnt more at the logging demo but mark explained alot when he said half the manufactures did not show up.
And Carl, what I was hinting at is maybe setting up chapters in each state with the people that live in each state that vist this web site and helping them set up demos and co op with each other to learn more about how everybody is doing things out there! It seems that the people in vermount and new hapsire seem to network with each other all the time on this site and Im sure folks in other parts of the country would enjoy this to

[Author]

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