Horse Buyers and Winter Plans

Selling horses is one aspect of the diversified farming practiced by David and Deborah. Though the alfalfa leaf is the farm's major money-maker, horses certainly contribute their share to the farm's income, both directly and indirectly. Indirectly, horses "save money to make money," as the saying goes, by using no expensive outside inputs like diesel fuel and tractor tires. David and the interns do all of the farrier (hoof) work (as the horses and not shod and only require the occasional cleaning and trimming), and they rarely require medical care. Horses are also the reason that the farm has such an easy time finding enthusiastic, unpaid labor, which saves quite a bit of money, I imagine. Directly, horses make money by being sold as trained draft teams or single horses.

Horse buyers are an unfortunately fickle and unreliable lot, however. Many people contact the farm saying that they would like to buy a team, but most of those people are not serious enough to go further than one or two emails. Some will come and "window shop," as Lisa puts it. Such buyers may come and drive horses and say that they are wonderful and will surely make a good team, and then leave, never to be heard from again. This is one kind of frustrating horse buyer experience.

The other kind of frustrating horse buyer experience stems from horse buyers with specific and difficult to match needs and wants. We recently had two loggers come to look for a single horse to match with their horse. Unfortunately, their horse was a very tall animal who fit poorly with all but one of our horses. Ben, the horse that did match with their animal had not been driven in a week or two, as we were focusing on training two other horses who were too small to be matched with the logger's horse. Ben was thus out of practice (he is quite a young horse, so he sometimes forgets his manners) and did not stand still very well when asked to stop (whoa). Thus the horse buyers drove away without one of our horses in their trailer, disappointing everyone.

On a more positive note, I thought I would share my plans for the winter, which have worked out quite well. After contacting several farms in June, July, and August, I managed to find a farm with draft horses that wanted to take an intern during the winter months. The farm, located in south-central Kentucky, raises a wide variety of livestock and uses draft horses for hay-making, feeding, and water-carrying. I hope to have many opportunities to drive their two Percheron (a breed of draft horse) mares. I will be leaving my current farm internship on November 1st, going back home via train to visit my family for a couple of weeks, and starting work on the Kentucky farm in late November.

The experience of working in the arid West has made me realize that I have little interest in living here. Though working here has been a good experience, I certainly wouldn't want to live in a place where it doesn't rain for four months in the summer, and where much of my time farming would be spent dealing with irrigation. I feel relieved that I found a farm in Kentucky to work on, and I think that I will confine my future internships to the area of the country east of the Mississippi. 

Long-Delayed Update and Photos

It has been two months since I updated. We have done much hay-making, getting in both first and second cuttings of some fields. Our first cuttings of hay all went for horse feed, which will be used to feed the herd and the work-horses in winter. Winter feeding 39 horses takes a considerable amount of feed, and we have several thousand bales for that purpose. Most small square bales are around 50 to 75 pounds, so 2,000 to 3,000 bales is quite a lot of hay!

The hay-making process starts with mowing, which is done on this farm with horse-drawn mowers manufactured in the 1930s and 1940s. The mowers work surprisingly well despite their age, as long as they are regularly oild and sharpened. They work on a "ground-drive" system, which means that the back-and-forth action of the knife is created by the turning of the wheels. In short, the rotation of the wheels turns a system of gears, which in turn rotates a fly wheel, which rotates a pitman stick, which is attached to the knife, which moves backwards and forwards through the hay crop. This ingenious and simple system translates forward rotational motion into back-and-forth motion of the cutting knife.

After mowing, the hay is left down to dry for one or two days. In the East, a process called "tedding" would be undertaking during this time, which consists of fluffing the hay with a specially designed implement. In the dry arid West, however, tedding is unnecessary. The next process is raking, which is done with a tool called a side-delivery rake. It, like the mower, is ground-driven, with the wheels turning gears, which turns a bar covered in curved bars that move the hay into a long windrow. You simply drive along in a straight (more or less, depending on your skill level) line, and the rake does the work of sweeping it into a windrow. It is a difficult thing to do at times, as it requires some tight turns to make the windrows close enough together to sweep up all of the hay.

Raking alfalfa is time-sensitive, as it cannot be either too wet or too dry. If it is too wet, it will rot. If it is too dry, the leaves (the most valuable part, and the part that the Maders sell to the herb companies) will fall off, or "shatter" in the hay-making jargon.

The final process is baling, which is one of the few things that the Maders do with a tractor. Balers require so much power to compress hay into flakes and tie the flakes into bundles that they virtually require the engine-driven power provided by a tractor. There are motorized hitch carts that horses can pull that will supply the neccessary power with considerably less fuel than a tractor would use, but the Maders do not have one (at least not yet).

After the bales are formed, the tractor can pick them up with another power-driven implement called a bale wagon or stack-liner, or we can go into the field with a horse-drawn wagon and pick them up manually. The latter is preferable because of the fuel savings, but we have done the bale pick-up in both ways.

I hope I have not gone into too much jargon and so on in the preceeding, but hay-making is a complex art that is difficult to explain. Hay should really be green on the inside of the bale when you take it apart, even though most people think of hay as a light brown color. Hay turns this light brown color because it gets rained on, which leaches out nutrients, or because it is exposed to light for too long. Out here in the West, hay is almost always of a consisently high quality compared to Eastern, rained-on hay. (Sorry Eastern hay-makers.)

I have posted a few pictures below that will show some things that have been going on around here.

Above is Ben, probably my favorite horse, being driven on a cultivator by Ryan, another intern. Ryan and his girlfriend Casey left a couple of weeks ago after working at the Mader farm for five and a half months.

Here is the horse-drawn wagon being stacked full of hay. Mirah the dog thinks she is being very helpful (she's not). That is Lisa, another intern, on top of the hay stack.

Here's a boring picture of sprinkler pipe in the farm's flattest and best field (plainly known as the Flat Field). The quarter-mile of pipe shown has to be moved twice daily for about two weeks to make it across the 35 acre field.

Here is a shot of me driving horses Flag (on the left from this view) and 'Miah (on the right). That is Ken, who is trying to start his own farm around here, on the hay stack. He has been helping out a lot since Ryan and Casey left.

Same horses, same driver.

The view from the driver's perspective on the wagon. I took this while driving that same load of hay to be stacked by the combine that cleans the alfalfa leaf.