The Suffolk Punch

Image Gallery PHOTOGRAPHS © KENNETH GARRETT WOODFIN CAMP & ASSOC.

Real horse power on the American farm.

By Jake Page

"Come up, gentlemen," says Jason Rutledge. The two red horses heave forward into their collars. The field cultivator—called a rear-end wiggler—lurches into motion.

Rutledge proceeds into the cornfield, drawn unerringly down the rows by two Suffolk Punch geldings. As each tautly muscled leg moves and plants a round hoof in the soil, it presses 1,600 pounds into the ground. A prodigiously powerful step, but delicate as these things are measured.

Rutledge holds the reins firm. "You've gotta stay in touch with them all the time," he says, and they move quietly through the cornfield while Rutledge tells them how well they're doing. Three thousand feet up on Copper Hill in the mountains south of Roanoke, Virginia, where he lives with his wife. Sally, and two youngsters, Rutledge "orders up" all of his 76 acres with these chestnut horses. It is quiet on the mountain, and the team, plodding through the cornfield, evokes idyllic memories, old photographs, times gone by.

But Rutledge will have none of that.

"I don't want to give the impression that I'm a complete eccentric," he says as the horses stop for a breather. "These animals have a place on the modern farm. Look down there."

Between the rows of corn the soil is soft, loose, moist. "Practically no soil compaction," Rutledge says and, satisfied he's made a point, sets off again behind the team.

An intense, muscular man of 36, Rutledge talks eloquently and often about the place of the draft horse on the farm today, especially the place of this particular kind of horse—the Suffolk Punch. Today he is one of the major breeders of this rarest of workhorses—there are fewer than 400 in the U.S., with another 200-odd in England. He owns more than 20, including a stallion and 12 brood mares. He points out that they're the only workhorses specifically bred for the farm. All the others derive from animals bred for military work—hauling knights in armor and, later, cannons.

Rutledge himself was in the military, the Navy, when he saw his first Suffolk. He was in England and saw a little boy leading a huge chestnut workhorse along a country road. Years later, he recalled the sight and felt driven to find out more about that powerful but docile horse.

What the sailor saw was a descendant of Crisp's horse of Ufford, a stallion foaled in 1768 and the foundation horse of the breed, making Suffolks among the oldest known breeds of heavy horses—certainly the breed with the oldest continuous studbook. They arose to fill the needs of farmers in the then remote area of England comprising Suffolk and Norwich counties, a region bordered on three sides by the North Sea and on the fourth by a boggy region called the Fens. For many years, there were practically no sales of the horses outside the area, so the breed remained pure—and relatively unknown.