Bonnie and Mayday: A Horsepower Farm Team

by Paul Birdsall of Penobscot, ME

Months ago, I started writing the following tribute to a great pair of horses, Bonnie and Mayday. “This is the story of a farm team which has given many years of service, and continues to play a special role at Horsepower Farm where almost all of the work has been done with horses since 1973.” Sadly, I can no longer say this, as of the two, only Bonnie remains. On February 15, Mayday, almost 22, and starting her twentieth year of work, went off her feed. By evening it was clear that I no longer had a team, as she had breathed her last. Now the story can only be told as one with an end and we at the farm must find a way to recombine horse teams so as to accomplish all that this team did so well.

The tale started in 1980. For some time, I had had two good horses, but needed a third to make a three horse hitch. I never seemed to have any luck finding that third one without health or behavior problems. So it was that I decided to raise and train some young horses from the ground up. Opportunity presented itself when I found Bonnie, a 7-month Belgian weanling, and learned that her mother was carrying another foal. We brought Bonnie home in January 1980, and since I needed to borrow the mother to work, she came in mid-June 1980 with Mayday, Bonnie’s half sister, born, as the name suggests, on May 1. With these young ones, I could try my hand at training from an early age, and had some assurance that as half sisters they would match up pretty well.

We had had quite a time loading Mayday and her mother from their hillside pasture to bring them home. Mayday was not a friendly or approachable foal, and I am convinced that she was born ill natured. Even after we got hold of her mother, she continued to dodge away from us. There was also a young gelding to be restrained who wanted a piece of the action. Finally, as Mayday rushed by, my wife, Mollie, tackled her around the neck and held on for dear life. We got them loaded, but this wasn’t the end of the story. Driving slowly away, I became aware of a terrible thumping in the trailer, and found the foal hanging upside down by her tie rope. I released her and all was well. But I had learned something: that you don’t tie foals in a horse trailer.

Confirming my impression of Mayday’s ill nature, I noticed that she would come to the door of the box stall and lay her ears right back. She was also a big, enterprising foal. One time I happened to look over my shoulder toward the box stall while engaged in hitching the mother between my two other horses. There was Mayday climbing over the stall door. Luckily there wasn’t too much pandemonium before we got her back inside but we had to put an extra bar across to keep her in. By now I was beginning to suspect that there might be an additional meaning in her name, to be specific, the international signal of distress, “mayday-mayday.”

That summer, as Bonnie became a yearling, her training started. We tied her alongside a working hitch and began getting her used to moving with the others, as well as to the feel of the harness. Later we hitched her to a forecart alongside Trixie, a very experienced and reliable little Belgian mare, and she went off very well. She was a quick learner, was soon doing some light chores with Trixie, and late in the summer even tedded some hay. By the following year we followed the same procedures with Mayday with generally good results. We also worked at training each young horse to ground drive single.

At about this time I began to be aware just how serious it might be for a bad experience to become lodged in a young horses mind, and of how difficult it might be to train the resulting fear and behavior problems out of the horse. To illustrate, I had Mayday out double on the forecart (homemade with no safety bar in front) a pickup truck came up behind us, and when I waved the driver on, he gunned the engine. Mayday panicked, backed up, and I went off the front, luckily still holding the reins as Mayday attempted to bolt. While Trixie and I easily controlled the situation, I sensed that unless we took immediate steps, Mayday would be frightened of motor vehicles, and, hence, not road safe.

Right away we started a retraining program which went on daily for a week or ten days. I would drive the pair on the forecart and someone else the farm van. We would approach, meet, pass, and stop side by side, anything to accustom Mayday to the presence of motor vehicles. By and large we were successful, except that with large trucks on the highway she still tended to jump around in the hitch a little. I think that there are some lessons in this tale, namely, try to ensure that a young horse has a consistently good experience in training and early work life. (Not easy to do.) Next, counter measures should be taken as soon as possible after a bad experience, to train the horse out of the behavior that results. Finally, make sure that your forecart has a safety bar or frame in front to prevent being thrown off. (All commercially made forecarts seem to have them, at least as an option.)

One of the adjustments we must make is to find or develop a new breaking horse. Trixie’s successor in this role was Mayday, and with her gone there is no obvious candidate. We are going to have to do something, as Harry, a yearling Suffolk gelding, is already accustomed to harness, and we will want to start him with a reliable horse this spring or summer. We could try Bonnie, but she is coming 23, and is not as patient as Mayday was, and, after all, how much longer is she going to work? Probably the choice will be Luke, a 6-year-old Suffolk gelding, who is still relatively inexperienced. He is very good natured and easy going and a quick learner as well.

By this time, some of the good Suffolk owners I have met since deciding to change over to this deserving breed may have been wondering when I would start talking about Suffolks. With Bonnie, the only remaining Belgian, there are four Suffolks trained to work, in addition to Harry whose career is just beginning. In addition, I have an interest in a Suffolk stallion, Herator, who stands at Ken Hussey’s farm in Biddeford, Maine. Herator is Harry’s sire, and we hope to get more replacements from him.

Returning to the story of the Belgian mares, as each reached the age of two, there was light work with the faithful Trixie on the manure spreader, wagon, or tedding and raking hay. By the time Bonnie was three, I felt it necessary to put her to work full time, as we were still short a horse, and had got by for a couple of years by borrowing. To be sure, some prefer to wait longer, but there seemed to be no ill effects from starting full time work this early. A lot of the heavier work was and is done with three abreast, and this makes it easier on young ones as well as those with a lot of age on them.

The following year, with Mayday at three ready for regular work, I did not hitch her right up with Bonnie, thinking it better to wait a little longer and not risk having an incident with two young green horses which might be difficult to control and which might give rise to future behavior problems. Nonetheless, when I did get to working them together, just such an incident occurred. We were hauling four-foot firewood on a bobsled, and unloading on to the back of the farm truck. The reins were tied through a stake pocket on the truck, probably not a good idea. My son came out of the woods with a four wheel drive pickup, the horses got agitated, the reins untied, and they were off across the field, headed for the barn. Approaching the barnyard with some anxiety, we found them standing calmly having placed the sled exactly where we usually unhitched. They had, however, passed through a pretty narrow opening between some machinery and a fence. Apparently they had not run blindly, and no harm, psychological or otherwise was done. We were lucky.

They were pretty ragged and uneven at first, but I began to work them regularly and they didn’t take long to adjust to each other, despite the fact their conformation and gaits were not exactly the same. Thus started their career as a team spanning almost twenty years. They were the first horses trained from the ground up at Horsepower Farm, and I have never done quite as well since. In addition to summer farm work and logging in the winter, they represented the farm at MOFGA’s (Maine Organic Farmer’s and Gardeners Association) Common Ground Fair many times, and appeared in Bob Mischka’s Draft Horse Calendar for May 1997. When harnessed and bridled in the stall they would come out one by one onto the barn floor and stand side by side waiting for the reins to be hooked.

This is the team with which farm apprentices learned to drive, and since most of the 130 apprentices who have been at the farm came after the early 1980’s, most will remember driving this team. Now, with the loss of Mayday, we are trying a young Suffolk gelding, Luke, with Bonnie. He is six years old, and she 23, but it seems to be going well. They started on the sled a few weeks ago, have been on the wagon, and have done pretty well on the logging arch, which requires more coordination than almost anything else. Now they are doing acceptably on a two-way sulky plow. However, I held my breath when we first brought them out on the floor to hook up the reins. Bonnie has not worked much with geldings, and not always pleasantly. In fact she took an instant dislike to one who was late gelded, and we had to use straps to keep her from kicking in the hitch. I am relieved to see that they are getting on better and better, so with a lot of work this spring, this year’s apprentices should be able to use them.

A couple of years ago, we went to a one-row bed system in the market garden, inspired by the example of Eric and Anne Nordell in northern Pennsylvania. The first step is to use a riding cultivator to mark the bed with a single tooth on 32” row spacing. I could count on Bonnie and Mayday to get the wheel mark for the new row just about on top of wheel mark from the previous one. They were then capable of cultivating accurately with the same machine, even before the planting emerged. This will be a hard act to follow for whatever team I choose for the task, but hopefully the young Suffolk team will be up to it. Why don’t we do some extra training to ensure that replacements are ready for work like this? Probably it is a question of limited time and energy.

I like to think of the day some years ago when the “Horse of Course” 4H Club came to visit. Bonnie and Mayday were on a forecart with a light draft spring tooth harrow behind. I started harrowing some tilled ground in a rectangular pattern with the 4H leader beside me on the seat. On the second round I gave her the reins and on the next I stepped off to be replaced by a 4Her. Next round the leader gave the lines to the young person and stepped off to be replaced by yet another. And so it went until everyone had had a chance to drive a round. I don’t know many teams that could be trusted to do this.

Just a few years ago at a draft horse working day at the farm, there were outside horses working and I had one of our teams out plowing. The farm apprentices of the time, a married couple, demonstrated cultivating single with Mayday. They then taught some of the bystanders how to drive Mayday and manage the cultivator. Then they hitched Bonnie and Mayday to the wagon for rides and further demonstrations. When Bonnie and Mayday were still young, I had a visit from Donald Nickerson of Brooks, Maine who has farmed and logged with horses virtually all his life, and whose judgment I very much respect. I pointed out Bonnie’s rather pretty head to my visitor. Donald turned right away to Mayday who had a rather large and ugly head. His words were “that’s the horse.” And indeed, that’s the way it turned out. Bonnie trained up well enough single and double, and was a good hard worker, but when it came to lugging a load slowly, she’d balk. (She has never dug potatoes.) In the garden she was good on the single cultivator, but was likely to shy and do damage if there was plastic around, row covers for example. Mayday, on the other hand, was the all around horse (a little too lively skidding logs) who would cultivate reliably regardless of distractions and would get down and dig on anything that went hard like the potato digger. The harder it went, the more she wanted to pull. And yet she could train young horses as well, and when doing so seemed always to be on her very best behavior.

They will be hard to replace on the corn and bean planter (a JD #290) with which we plant several acres of dry beans and a little sweet corn. Hitched to a tongue truck the horses were well out ahead of the planter, but they walked a straight line and could pivot the planter around perfectly at the end of the row. Several years ago, putting in dry beans on a warm still early June day, I noticed the machine was not planting, and that the main drive chain was nowhere to be seen. Leaving Bonnie and Mayday to stand, I walked back up the row several hundred feet, found the chain (luckily intact) returned and replaced it on the planter. They hadn’t moved a step. (The next year, I replaced all the flat chains on the planter).

Another story concerns a day when several apprentices were using this team and a wagon to transfer horse manure to another storage site. They had to back the wagon into the manure pad and then, when loaded, negotiate a narrow gate and pull up close to the unloading area. I remember an apprentice who was driving saying that the team was not handling as well as usual but thought nothing of it until, stopping the horses for a noon break, I noticed that Bonnie’s outside rein had not been made to the bit. They had worked all morning with that rein still snapped to the hame ring.

Certainly the experiment in starting these horses young was a success, but I came to realize that just because horses come to the farm young, or are foaled there does not necessarily ensure that they will work out. Two horses, which were born here, are no longer around. What hadn’t been considered adequately was the factor of heredity as shown in the disposition and temperament of the breeding stock. Now that I have a yearling colt sired by a good natured, calm, willing Suffolk stallion, I am more than ever convinced of the importance of these factors.

As noted, the passing of Mayday leaves me with one aged Belgian. The Suffolks comprise a 13-year-old mare, her gelded 7-year-old son, and her 5-year-old daughter who has a yearling colt and is carrying an August foal, hopefully. In addition, there is Luke who is working with Bonnie.

In the spring and early summer we like to put two teams in the field on any given day, one of 2, and one of 3. With the present gang we can do this. We’ll have to be careful of Bonnie and hope that she can work a couple of years longer until yearling Harry is ready to take her place. We should also train Luke to work in as many combinations as possible. Emma will have to be taken out of work some time ahead of foaling in early August.

I probably relied on the old girls too much in the last couple of years, but perhaps this is understandable. I thought that they deserved this tribute for all their work, and that this account might prove somewhat instructive as well. Meanwhile I like to remember them on the riding cultivator. They always broke into a fast swinging trot on the way to the field, right in step, even the last summer they worked together.

P.S. Since finishing this article, enough time has elapsed so that we can see how things are working out. Emma, the five-year-old Suffolk, has come right to the fore, and is marking one-row beds, cultivating, and working on the two-row planter with Bonnie. She is proving a willing and intelligent successor to Mayday.

Luke, on the other hand, is in transition. It is good that he has speeded up and can work vigorously with any other horse. On the other hand, he has become a little sour and difficult to hitch, and may be proving to be a little too much for Bonnie. Perhaps this is because he was acquired and started late, and not much was asked of him early. Probably another season of work will settle him down. Also we may have to find him an easier bit, as his mouth is a little sore. In the end he will make it, but it just goes to show how sometimes the developmental course of a young horse is difficult to predict. Years ago, I had had some doubts about Mayday as a young horse, but she proved to be the best I ever had.