In the span of his seventy years, Bob Anderson has pretty much done it all, and I daresay done it all pretty well. Over the years he has trained innumerable horses, during the past decade he has started judging draft horse shows, and he remains a showman himself. Overall, Bob has the credentials of a teamster, trainer, judge, and it certainly seems, a gentleman. Here in central NYS, if you hear someone who has a problem with horses, the advice that is usually meted out is, “Go talk to Bob Anderson.” I’d like to share the opportunities I had to talk with Bob at various times one summer.

There is a certain set of skills and knowledge that tend to fall through the cracks of your average farm how-to book. Books of a more specialized nature are also abundant but often seem to take a fairly simple subject and make it seem daunting in scope and detail. What follows are a few tidbits of knowledge that I have found useful over the years – the little things that will inevitably need to be learned at some point in the farmer education process.