The Suffolk Punch

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Then there are the thousands of Amish farmers who use only draft power in their fields. The Amish are certainly a draft horse success story. They have kept their farms and communities thriving—indeed, they've almost doubled their numbers during the last two decades—in a time when the demise of the family farm is taken for granted. To a large extent, the Amish themselves credit the horse with keeping their farms intact. Wen-dell Berry (author, essayist, poet and draft horse farmer in Kentucky) once heard a Mennonite farmer say to an Amish one, "I wish I could persuade you people to use pneumatic tires on your equipment. It would be such a savings to the equipment and the horses, too." The Amish farmer replied, "If we do that, we'll make our machinery able to be pulled by a tractor, to go straighter in the fields and so forth. The first thing you know, we'll be using tractors. And I want my children to farm." His point, Berry explains, was that if the offspring were to hope to farm, they would have to farm with horses.

That statement hints at one of the most fascinating aspects of using draft horses: They work best on, and therefore help create, small, diversified, sustainable farms—exactly the kind that seem so rare yet desirable today. Here's why:

1. Draft horses are efficient only close to home. You can't work rented "widow 40s" miles away with horses; it takes too long for them to walk there. So the farm must be relatively small (most horse-powered farms are under 200 acres) and compact. Horses are also, in general, slower than tractors—another limit on farm size.

2. Draft horses are most economically efficient if you take advantage of the side benefits they offer. One of these is the fact that you can grow their feed. This promotes a diversified farm that includes pasture, hay and grain. Not only does this dramatically lower a farmer's expenses and raise his or her independence (no bill for tractor fuel), but it promotes soil-conserving diversity and crop rotation. As Maurice Telleen puts it, "Using draft horses flies in the face of monoculture."

3. Once you're using land to produce horse feed, the easy and logical next step is to raise some other livestock. Most draft horse farmers do, indeed, raise cattle, sheep or some other stock as well as their work animals. Two species will usually do a more efficient job of grazing a pasture than horses alone.

4. Draft horses supply nine to 15 tons of manure a year, each. Manure's so valuable for soil fertility that farmers like Chris Haug-sten claim, "You can't have an organic farm without having animals."

5. Draft horses do a better job. They compact the soil less, cultivate it more cleanly, plow the right depth more often and log with less damage than internal combustion machinery. As Wendell Berry remarked after examining horse-and tractor-worked fields, "I can say unhesitatingly that, although the tractors do faster work, they do not do it better."

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IMPLEMENTS FOR FARMING WITH HORSES AND MULES'

Sam Moore

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