What can be more important to sustainable farming than training farmers to insure its continuation? If farm numbers are to increase, we must have a way to pass the necessary skills on to the next generation. In speaking with Paul Birdsall of Maine, who has had about 130 apprentices over 27 years on his horse powered farm, he said, “Molly and I always considered having apprentices to be the most important thing we did.” He now has a whole network of small farmer friends who were once his apprentices.

Baled hay requires about 400 cubic feet to store a ton. A draft horse can easily eat 5000 pounds or about 1000 cubic feet of hay in a year, even if pasture is available in the summer. This would fill a 12 foot by 12 foot room seven feet deep. Weight of hay is also a consideration as anyone who has stacked square bales on a wagon behind a baler knows. Confronted with these big volumes of heavy stuff we recently converted most of our hay making from square bales to round bales. This greatly reduced the labor to get the hay bales, but left us with new questions about hay handling and feeding.