The bees, or yellow jackets, as I found out later, were tangled in my hair and under my shirt and pants, had stung me from the top of my head to my feet where they had wormed themselves under the flap of the only shoe I was wearing. I finally stumbled out of the barn into the yard. My grandfather had grabbed a hand-held insect spray and my grandmother had snatched a fly swatter. I’m sure if I had not been in so much pain I would have found the scene hilarious.

One afternoon the last week of May
Trying to envision a paddock for heifers,
A mile of fence wire around an acre:
I remember the Atwood’s empty pasture:
Tilted posts and rusty wire
And I fetch a bucket, hammer and chunk of wood.

Debbie Apple still remembers the day in 1993 when her 2 year-old son, Brayden, was crawling around in her garden. She looked up in time to see him pluck a strawberry off the plant and pop it into his mouth. She panicked as she realized she had just spread a pesticide throughout the garden. “I think I had never thought of those things (chemicals) as poisonous before. I always just thought of them as part of the garden … that’s how it had been relayed to me at the co-op,” Debbie says.

Whether you are actually fitting a collar to the horse or measuring for one, the horse’s head must be facing straight ahead and at the height he normally works. Otherwise the collar will not fit when he is working.

What do Daniel Boone, John Jacob Astor, and Aspen Hill Farms, of Boyne City, Michigan have in common? Plenty, it seems. As a youngster, I loved the outdoors, especially trapping and hunting. My knowledge of plants and animals was acquired not only from years of practical experience and observation, but also by reading and studying about the stories of our early frontiersman. It is well known that these adventurers were actively involved in the fur trade. What is generally not known, however, is that they were also buyers and dealers of native medicinal plants.

Barn Remodel • IH Color Plates • Safety Tongue • Whip Sockets • Plow Clevises

As “the city of honey,” Sortino has the honor of sponsoring annual festivals, conferences and has a beekeeping museum. The town of 9,200 inhabitants hosts 65,000 tourists every first weekend of October, during its honey festival. There are parades, honoring the beekeeping traditions, honey tasting contests and the baking of customary sweets. There is also an annual conference of the Great Honeys of the Mediterranean, which continues to grow nationally and internationally.

We had lived out on our farm on the Rusk Highway for about three years and in those three years I had watched the chicks hatch, a foal born, and on one Sunday at our regular fried chicken dinner, Daisy, our favorite milk cow delivered early in the side yard right outside the dining room window. Grandma was extremely upset, but Daddy Joe, my grandfather, just smiled and said that Mother Nature must not have any respect for human beings’ meal times.

On the surface you could say that George Dimick was an Oregon horseman and logger, born in Washington in 1908, to a hardworking farm family. His father drove the horsedrawn school bus to make extra money. When Dimick senior was stricken by Typhoid Fever, not-so-little 8 year old Bud had to take over the route until his father returned to the job.

Naturally, there were always more tasks that needed tending to in the wintertime, when all the farm animals were kept in the barns, to shelter them from the cold and snow of the harsh, Adirondack winters. With approximately 30 head of milk cows, several young replacement heifers, half a dozen brood sows, a pair of work horses, and assorted rabbits, chickens, young calves, two ponies, a goat and other “small stock,” there was never a lack of things to do, I can assure you.

The Conestoga horse was an early native North American breed of draft horse developed in the early 1700s. It was bred for farm labour and to pull the distinctive Conestoga freight wagon. Unfortunately the breed was absorbed through cross breeding and disappeared.

David’s system of overseeding vegetables with a poly-culture of perennial forages seems like the perfect model for integrating animals with market gardening. In our minds, grazing animals on perennial fallow year cover crops also takes the bio-extensive method to the next level by enhancing soil quality, saving labor and reducing fertility inputs.

Poems by Uncle Will Cleek, Todd Davis, David Feela, Paul Hunter, Bob Artley and Chloe Molner

Having completed the construction of a new barn many years ago, something appeared missing as I observed from a distance. After some time pondering what was absent, I came to the conclusion the barn was lacking a weather vane on top of the cupola. I decided to come up with something that would be both functional and unique and could be built in the farm shop at little or no expense.

In effect, farmers increasingly have been left to fend for themselves. They operate under intense pressure at the most vulnerable end of so-called commodity value-chains. There is money being made in prairie agriculture, but increasingly it flows through farmers’ hands; this reality is reflected in the growing gap between their gross and net incomes. At the same time, farmers are fair game for newspaper columnists quick to spot a “bailout” to a “chronic subsidy industry.” The question of whether there will be a successor generation will be decided within the next decade.

Today, as we dodged the quick-moving thundershower under the protective canopy of tall sugar maples soon to be bathed in the hallowed glow of a double rainbow cresting over the Lowell Mountains, I realized that my partnership with this land and these horses is sacred. I wonder: how I have come to be in this spot, at this time, working the woods on the high ground of Mark Dunbar’s hilltop farm in northern Vermont, calming a willing but nervous team of horses as thunderbolts and lightning rattle the woods all around. How have I learned to be with these horses? I think a decade of spending my daily routine with them is surely not enough. How does knowledge become instinct? How does understanding transcend into immediate, thoughtful and deliberate action?

Now, Jack had reached a place of frustrations in his personal life that eventually led to a divorce and created a lack of direction. When he returned from Korea as a war correspondent, one of his editors, Ninetta Eames, invited him to spend time in the countryside of Glen Ellen to think about his future. Little did Jack London know that when he boarded the passenger train in Oakland and traveled through the Valley of the Moon in Northern California that his life would change in unexpected ways.

Coloring • Going to School or Delivering Milk • Roly-poly Paper Man • Learning to Draw

The calf was bedded down on some hay. I opened the cattle panel that was used as a gate. The heifer jumped up, ran around the barn, and then ran straight into the cattle panel. Unfortunately, I hadn’t wired the panel shut when I went in, and she hit it hard enough to push it partially open and out she went. She headed east and through the neighbor’s fence.

When I first looked up and noticed the clusters of purplish red berries, I thought, what a magical place, where fruit grows like this by the side of the road so anyone can stop and fill a bucket with sweetness. Then I popped a couple berries in my mouth and dropped my bucket, spitting a wad of pulpy pits at the dirt: my first taste of chokecherries.

The Newfoundland Pony has the components of numerous different strains in its foggy past. Dartmoor and Exmoor Ponies, New Forest and Galloway, Welsh, Connemara and Sable Island.

Portable Forges • Scrapers • Grain Shocker • Weber Wagons

Make no mistake about it: horse logging is serious, dangerous, skilled hard work. And it’s also a fact that loggers enjoy making a game of it when they can. They take great pleasure in producing a jaw-dropping exhibition of what their teams can do. And Jason Rutledge, a sort of green missionary for the use of draft animals in what he calls “restorative forestry,” loves to preach the horse-logging gospel.

Where have all the bees gone? Many who care deeply are searching. Clues are floating to the surface. I see parallels with the human condition of late. Not to suggest that we live in colonies which are collapsing, but rather that if we did live in colonies or clusters or like-minded swarms we would be better insulated against what seems to be heading our way. We actually live today in a morass of commerce-defined mud which denies us our ability to produce “honey.” We have little or no savings or food put by or fuel stockpiled or seed saved. Many of us live without a support group of family and neighbors ready and anxious to help each other out in times of need. We live day-to-day trusting that what we need will be available and affordable when we need it.

The agricultural revolution occurring in Cuba today is not about communism or capitalism or Fidel or Raul Castro. Rather it is about an energetic and creative population of rural and urban farmers who were able to respond to an unusual set of historical circumstances.

Dixon was once known as the “Lamb Capital of the World,” because more sheep were raised here than in any other region in the world. At one time, there were about 10,000 sheep for every resident in the city. Prior to the lifting of the lamb embargo in 1965, lamb was the primary industry in Dixon, with dairying a close second. New Zealand imports have seriously impacted the sheep industry in Dixon, however, Superior Farms has retained the packaging plant in Dixon, and is still one of our larger employers. The lamb and wool industries are still a significant contributor to our economy.

I was fortunate to grow up in an area where there were men still working cattle, accomplishing meaningful tasks on their farms and in the woods. Because they were making part of their living using oxen, I put great value in the details, such as the equipment they used and how the work was performed. One such individual is my neighbor Frank Scruton, who I have profiled in this issue. Another neighbor, Les Barden, shared with me this information about hauling wood.

Call them cockleburs, stick buttons, beggar’s buttons, or just plain nuisances, they are rife this time of year, clinging to anything and anyone that moves about in the countryside. It’s not too difficult to pick them off a pair of blue jeans, but they’re mean on sweaters with their tenacious little hooks. They are the leading cause of “bad hair days” among farm animals.

There are a lot of folks who spend many hours thinking about what they want out of their life but, in the past 40 years or so, I have been blessed to have my dream beat me over the head whenever I get off track. My trip, however, has not been a straight road in the fast lane.