We arrived bright and early Friday morning and had everything ready when the gates opened. Switching to my role as photographer, it didn’t take long to realize that if you weren’t early for the various events, particularly in the Main Arena, you weren’t going to get a good seat. Right off the bat I was late to the Pony Parade.

The Challenge was Mernie’s idea because he wanted a new way to show off the intelligence of oxen beyond their power in the pulling ring. He had raised and trained oxen all his life so he designed an obstacle course, which he also judged for many years. He set up pylons topped with tennis balls as teasers. There was a log to drag and tight turns to be taken, as if the team was working in the woods. Next the log had to be loaded onto a woodshod sled which was then hauled back through the pylon path to the finish line where the log was left for the next team.

Willy tended to see things in the reverse of most others. Where many people saw bucolic green fields free of cows, he saw fields that cows could improve. He saw grass turning to milk. He saw a mobile milker that gave a farmer, maybe him, a place to milk and bottle leading to fresh local milk. He saw the wisdom of good practice pulling in carbon and helping the soil hold water, which would lead to fire resilience. The fields were a million shades of green until the dry season when greens crispened to brown and gold. What people failed to see was that the fields would change without animals. He could put to use something that wasn’t being used and make it better.

“I don’t want to kill them. I just want to scare them.” She pleaded “I used to be able to shoo them away, but they have started to ignore me. When I throw something in their general direction, they take off but I’ve been doing it so often that I’ve got Tennis Elbow.”

A few months back I had occasion to speak with a Yukon Territory subscriber, Finella Pescott on the phone. As we compared notes I learned that she had a photo book on Cabins of the Yukon. I was intrigued, solely on the basis of the title and her side story of traveling and taking pictures of what, to her eye, were unique handmade homes in her part of the world. After the book arrived I was enchanted.

Done with grooming, the young man went for a short bucket of grain and two carrots. First he fed Toot. Then as he walked around to Rub’s grain box he noticed Toot lay his ears back at his teamate’s long-nose sniffing. Rub always suspected that Toot got something special, but the mule just could not prove it.

One of my husband’s outstanding qualities is his impeccable memory when it comes to important things. Namely, our anniversary or my birthday. He never forgets and they never slip by. One year, near the end of winter as the approach of spring was on the horizon, he asked what I wanted for my birthday. He always makes me something handmade, so he needs a little time to prepare. He has made wooden spoons, tricolored cutting boards, cauldron paddles, a wooden butter churn, stone or mother-of-pearl jewelry; sometimes by request, sometimes by surprise. That year, however, I stepped outside of the usual range with the unromantically practical request of a new clothesline.

I was three years old the first time, then revisited those same streets when I was twelve. Don’t know how much of the time signature my memory mixes up but, as this story goes; when I was a baby we lived with my mother’s folks, la familia Perez, in Rio Piedras, on the edge of San Juan, Puerto Rico. My grandmother, Innocencia, would send me ahead, down two buildings, with a coin in my tiny fist, to buy two long skinny loaves of bread that were warm, aromatic, fresh from the bakery oven.

Electric Log Cart • Ten Ton Ore Wagon

Excerpts from Chapter One of Kirk Webster’s Important New Book: Even if you can’t see the inside of a hive of bees, it’s fascinating just to watch the colony entrance and the bees coming and going from a beekeeper’s pine box, or from the knothole of an oak tree in the forest. You can’t see the nectar they’re carrying inside their bodies, but you can see the pellets of pollen attached to their legs; a different color for each different species of plant they are visiting. A little study and observation reveals that this pollen could come from anywhere within at least two miles of this hive entrance. Thousands of bees effortlessly navigate back and forth from our hive entrance to the flowers; despite clouds, wind, showers, and a constantly moving sun.

Anyways, Horse Progress Days is here! Heading for the announcing wagon in the field, I fight off the normal knot in my stomach. I have been tasked with the first hour of announcing equipment. Regardless of how often I have done this, my stomach still has pre-game jitters. First up, manure spreaders, a smaller forecart pulled with 2 Fjords from Daran Nelson. Very fitting to have Fjords used in Rich Horovy’s home area. Rich had been a national committee member and long time Fjord breeder. The manure spreader is a Lancaster, one of the main horse drawn spreaders today. The forecart, a Homestead, all the way from Lodi, Ohio. Sharing the announcing, for horses, is the eloquent Henry Detweiler. The manure spreaders continue, fittingly.

I jumped out of the truck and ran into the barn. Lady was in the last stall and pulling the door open. I grinned. She was definitely ready to ride. Grabbing her halter, I kissed to her and slid it on leading her out, I tied her to the stall. I grabbed a brush and curry comb from the tack room and started my favorite part of the morning “now lady we’re going with getting you used to standing still so I can get on” I said. I tried to talk to her as much as I can so she gets used to my voice.

The Rubaiyat of a Cat and a Girl in a Flat

In my musings, last issue I speculated to ask ‘could there be a relationship between our North Country artist friend, Lesley Schatz, and the mythic figure within Dylan’s North Country Fair?’ Then she emailed me, sent me these images of her important chicken paintings and explained about her music. Lesley is a wondrous treasure and just as complex as that suggests. We had a listen to what we could find of her music and it’s grand.

With haying season approaching, I was anxious to get three year-old Ruby going well enough to put her into the hay string this year. I had had a fair number of sessions in the round corral, and she was doing fabulously. The harness I was using at the time was shabby and ill-fitting, which is fine if you’re just doing groundwork, but I knew I would need to get her a proper harness before I started actually hitching her. When her new harness finally arrived in a big cardboard box in the mail, I went straight away to the barn and took my time carefully fitting her out.

I have little knowledge of mapping in America other than to assume that the place names of many cities and towns are named after the European locations the settlers came from. And to trust that native American names were collected as sensitively as our names were in the original survey of 1824. It is remarkable that the English officers Colby; Drummond; and Larcom knew of the importance of place names in the Irish psyche and to this end employed John O’Donovan; an Irish scholar in a class of his own. O’Donovan travelled throughout the island of Ireland interviewing ‘wise old heads;’ collecting Irish place names and translating them into English – in such a way that their original meaning would not be lost.

Rollman Transplanter • Oliver Cultivator • Fillister Plane • GopherHawk

Ivan Miller has earned an enviable reputation for building high quality scale model Rumely tractors that are fully operational. His achievements evolved through a dream, as he explained. “I admired scale model Rumelys that were displayed at tractor shows. When I was about 14 years old, Dad and I dreamed of building our own version. Eventually, we set to work and scaled one from a Rumely Model 16-30 that Dad owned. I had considerable steel fabricating experience through my former job that helped with the project. Over the past five years, I have scratch-built four of the same model. Through each build, I have added more detail,” Ivan said.

At the beginning of the 1950s, Luxembourg’s photojournalist and chronicler Pol Aschman captured a very unusual scene for his photo series titled “Streifzug Ösling,” translated in English “Excursion to the Ösling.” This does not refer to the mixed team of draught horse and cattle, where only the horse was driven by the farmer with a single jerk line and the ox just ran along besides, but to the wagon. Such tongue-less three-wheel tipping carts were only common in the European lowlands, such the Northwest of France, the coastal areas of Belgium or the Netherlands, where they were called “driewielskar.”

Tony had genuine deep-grained love of sports. He believed his older brother, me, to only care about farming and the arts. So when I developed a fascination for a particular college basketball team and became a fan, it both intrigued and humored him. To him it seemed so incongruous for me, one who regularly disparaged football and golf, to get so worked up over this one lowly basketball team. But Kristi’s cousin is the coach and both Tony and I have known Mark for decades. That was a bridge and Tony got hooked as well.

Neonicotinoids are a group of pesticides that became available in the mid 1990’s. They are extremely effective, and unfortunately, popular. They are a systemic insecticide that renders the entire plant toxic to invertebrates (insects, arachnids and more). Technically they can be toxic to mammals as well but they’re usually applied in doses low enough that we do not exhibit symptoms. The long-term effects have not been fully researched.

I think there are external and internal motivations that drive our actions, and this has been no different for me. I would like to say that I come from a family of small farmers, but this is not the case. I grew up in a medium-sized town along a main road. We didn’t have any pets until I was twelve and I had no real exposure to farming. That changed during my teenage years, when I first worked a garden with my parents, later added one of my own and finally started keeping my own animals (first rabbits, later chickens). I also spent some time on my grandfather’s dairy goat farm in southern Wisconsin. These experiences with growing my own food, acquiring craft skills and literally grasping our nature were certainly the seeds that later germinated everything.