I’ve learned that one of the most important skills you need to develop as a livestock farmer, is being able to compassionately handle your animals. I didn’t grow up farming, so I learned these skill from other farmers I’ve been lucky enough to meet along the way.
One of the experiences which helped me understand the basics of working with animals was when I trained with a teamster named Donn Hewes. In case you don’t recognize the farm lingo here, a teamster is someone who is farming (or logging) with horses, mules or oxen.
You see, for a considerable amount of time, I thought our farm was going to be a vegetable farm and that the farm itself would be powered by horses. There are very few farmers these days that have chosen to rely on horses instead of tractors. Donn and his wife Maryrose (of Northland Sheep Dairy) are two of them, and lucky for me, they were starting a Teamster School at their farm and were happy to have me on board as their first student back in 2015.
I lived with Donn and Maryrose for a little over a month, staying in a tiny apartment above the horse barn. Every day, Donn found activities for me to do with the horses and showed me how to communicate with the horses to get farm work done. It was winter-time, so this meant learning how to drive the horses through thick snow, how to haul logs back to the their big wood shed, and how to plow snow, all while keeping the horses stress free. I will never forget the time Jenney came to visit and I even learned how to use horses to pull her car out of a snowbank! They were seemingly simple tasks that I didn’t come close to mastering, in part because the relationship and communication between farmer and animal is complex and takes lots of time and practice.
I learned so much from these experiences and I’m certain that they still inform my farming practices today. Through working with horses, I learned how to observe better the natural inclinations of the animals I’m working with and use that knowledge to built smarter farms systems that prevent our animals from experiencing stress. I think back to these same principles that Donn and Maryrose taught me when I work with our chickens, turkeys and pigs every day.
And even though I’m very confident in our decision to farm with a tractor instead of horses, I still think about hearing the snorts and heavy hoof falls of draft horses on our farm some day…a boy can dream. ?
Your Farmers,
Greg & Jenney