[mitchmaine]

Horsemanship. Kind of a zen thing, isn’t it? The endless journey to the unreachable goal. No matter how many steps we have taken on the path, there is always one more. The goal is horsemanship. We can trade tips and advice and stories and such, but any experience and wisdom gained, is ours and ours alone. Non-transferable. We can’t sell it or even give it away. Everyone has to make his/her own journey. If it has no end (this journey), only death, then presumably, it has no beginning either, so if you try and set a point when your horsemanship training started, we’d all have to say at birth, and everything we have learned in our life about human needs and interaction, body language and so on, are all effective tools in the life long process. Enjoy the trip.

[mitchmaine]

Yes carl, that was one of the finer points of my make-believe model. Instead of the logger chasing the forester through the woodlot acre per acre following paint, both of you with this myopic view of the final cut, the logger(steward) would over time, have an overview of the complete forest(however large), and range over it thinning here and there to appease the trucker without damaging the forest in one area or another. You could cull out the wood destined to mature and blow down soon, like the fir and popple, leaving the long lived wood to mature and culling out the wolves as you go. Dependant on the woodlots needs and not the checkbook. You would be making money, whatever you cut as well as the landowner, and the forester too, as long as he and you shared the over view, ( he is the abstract here, that I can’t quite find a spot for. Difficult to imagine marking several hundred acres ahead of your cutting. It would be better if he consulted and trusted your judgement to help make it work smoothly). Instead of worring about where your next woodlot would be, you would be on it indefinitely, free to work your art and magic and care for the wood and the land.

[mitchmaine]

Hey andy,
Its very frustrating. I’ve been watching the wood business go over the horizon for a long time and keep trying to come up with solutions that fit me and my particular needs.
The coast line down here is full of lots of new wealthy residents, who don’t need a lot of money, and could benefit greatly from our experiment. A problem seems to be that houselots(even 3-5 acres) don’t usually have enough marketable wood to warrant a cut. cutting in and around buildings and powerlines gets tricky. So its landscaping that we end up doing and that’s fine until you have two really nice saw logs or two cord of hardwood and three cord of pulp, not enough wood to pay for trucking. Saw mills balk when they hear you are cutting next to buildings cause the logs can and usually are full of iron. It can be a real hastle.
So what do you do? My favorite daydream is finding a few benevolent woodland owners, not necessarily in the same area(but that would be better), with 5-600 acres of wood between them, and agree to be their practitioner for good. A man(or woman) with a pair of horses could cruise that amount of land forever. It would take five years to cover that amount of land, just in time to start thinning it over again. The better the wood got, the higher the browse, and less inviting to your deer and so on, so you might have to devise an alternative plan to open up areas to sun and grow some berries and popple, and birch, or whatever you and your landowner and his or her forester came up with for a life plan for the woodlot but…………the key is you are the steward. Without the stumpage issue, I think a guy might just make it, once you get your roads laid out and yards and brows built.
The reality, for me, was after a few cuts, and the wood started to come, someone else would come along and offer huge money and strip the place. But if you could find the right people………………..

[mitchmaine]

right rick,
up here forty years ago, stumpage was hard to find, most neighbors cut their own wood. took a generation, but that changed. hardly anyone cuts their own wood, but they still expect compusation or fair stumpage for taxes spent. so it is logical to expect that another generation could swing to our mindset of forest stewardship. i am not expecting to see it, but i believe it might happen.

[mitchmaine]

hey eli,
i’d be more worried about you up there. if you got tripped up and she pulled away, she might pull her load right over you. at least if you are back behind the chain, it might not feel to comfortable for a while but you are in a safer place. good luck with it. line drive her till you feel good with that, then twitch some wood out on open ground til you feel ok there. you will know when its time to go in the woods

[mitchmaine]

We had five saw mills in our town 30 years ago. Each hiring several men to roll logs and take away. Now there are only two. Each run by one man. Not very efficient, but workmans compensation made it impossible to run their mills with hired help. The next town over had a small pulp mill and a wood fiber plant that each closed down ten or fifteen years ago for similar reasons.
Half the problem of finding a nitch(niche) for successful horse logging is having a diversity of markets to cut for. There were bolt mills for trap(lobster) stock(red oak-live edge), toothpicks(yellow and paper birch), maple furniture, bobbins and spool mills and so on and so on. All gone.
Even the big boys(biomass) balance all their millions on two mills that run close to supply.
6000 men cut wood in maine in the 60’s. choppers, not forested related jobs. Now I dare to say its under 1000. Not because we ran out of wood. We ran out of diverse demand.
Forest products industry is probably 100’s of millions still here in state, but how much of that stays in state? And where does your horse fit in?

[mitchmaine]

i’m not smart enough to get that metaphor, andy, but i do appreciate all the numbers and hits and so on, just don’t know what to do with them. the fact that we have 35,000 posts is a little awe inspiring. and then you wonder haven’t we just about said it all and somebody comes up with something and off we all go with it. i love it. keep at it bud

[mitchmaine]

hey andy, not clear myself what dap was or is now, how or if it has changed. i guess it has to with new people and new posts, questions, remarks and so on. and that is normal growth, but i have to think that the success of dap depended on what it was and why people wanted to join in then, than something we might change to now. you remember what they said about killing the goose.

[mitchmaine]

hi jen,
mike got it about right. it shouldn’t take alot of work to get 100 bales (two ton) to the acre. you have to feed it, and you can squeeze a little more, but as a rule, thats what you shoot for in new england. 25 bales wouldn’t be worth the effort and you would could should see the cutter bar from the seat of the mower. old field gets rootbound, and the ph is very acidic, but with a little plowing, and a lot of lime (5-6 tons per acre) you can bring them back around. its the land that needs the eye. not to boney, or swampy, or swaley or steep, but that said, lots of hay has been taken off some pretty hard chance around here. looking araound,eh? good luck there

[mitchmaine]

I’m wondering if we didn’t leave sustainability behind us when we climbed down out of the trees and started agriculture. As hunter/gatherers, we were part of a much larger balance sheet. On the move all the time, taking the weaker of the herd animals, we had a niche and fit it well.
As soon as we domesticated plants, we needed to do the same with animals. We set up all the steps to create the first city. One person growing enough food to sustain others and freeing them up to create social order. Next, an army, and so on.
Trying to make a farm sustainable means creating a city and the model fails.

[mitchmaine]

I have been on the board of directors of the maine maple association for just over 20 years now (a foundation stone of our mission statement is education), and a lot of diectors have come and gone in that time. A good deal of those folk were maple equipment dealers, and the cynic in me at the time would have said they were there to promote their own interests, and I might have been right, but the results of them being there were that things got done and new things happened with lots of energy. Workshops and maple events and so on. Things that might not have gotten done without their amazing energy. I watched it happen. Years when the directors were mostly sugarmakers would be full of ideas and planning and talk. Add one or two dealers and things started happening. The motivation might have been some personal gain, but who cares, the results were educational workshops with lots of new stuff to look at and talk about and the leap over to neapfd is pretty easy. Some guy brings his horsedrawn solar powered backhoe grader to demonstrate and sells two but a few guys look it over and pretty sure they could makeit at home and come up with their own version and write about it on dap.net and inspire a few others to jump in and before you know it we are off and running with some other tool. It’s a great thing, we shouldn’t think about it too much, just keep doing it.

[mitchmaine]

lif is weekend after next i think, we’ll miss you.
that deadman is a footpedal similar to a brake and you sit. not too bad. but ( the tedder) is out in ohio and we were just there, probably won’t be back out there til spring. i thought once about putting the motor on the tedder driving the imput shaft, like a baler, but the safety issue is too big with a tedder to risk it i think. the tail shaft to the tedder should be above the hitch like it would be on a tractor. 8 horse would power it for sure, i think daniel powered his with a 5 horse honda. not sure i would invest a good pioneer cart for this project. you might think of cobbling up a new cart and designing it to fit your needs for the tedder and possibly other pto equipment. good luck, mitch

[mitchmaine]

hey mark, how the heck are ya? i have an amish friend who (with a homemade forecart very similar to pioneer) did just what you are asking. he mounted the motor on the deck off to the right, with a belt drive to a tail shaft (reduced 3-1?????with shives) under the deck and a deadman clutch. you had to stand on the pedal to power the tedder. light and compact. like most amish machinery, used used used.

[mitchmaine]

hi george, maybe that 5/16 bolt had a bushing to help the tug wear better. that might make up for the extra 16th.
never heard of pulling the saddle and girt off. we used to strip off the britchin and throw the tugs over their back for twitching single, but needed the saddle to hold the tugs in place. maybe the team was hooked into a yoke steady, but without a jack saddle the weight of the pole would hang on their collars. doesn’t seem like a good idea to me. let us know what you find out.

[mitchmaine]

hi ellen,
wondering if your horse(presuming too) has ever been in shafts? that can be a new ezperience for sure. it is a pretty confing space and a horse needs time to get aquainted to that.

meaders up in rochester(n.h.) will have liverpools. probably about $30 – 40 a peice. there is a lot of different opinions on that bit, but i have used them on some pretty headstrong horses and held them. the horses i use now are pretty good and the lines are hooked into the sidering and the curb is loose to its last ring and its a pretty easy bit on them. it has a wide arrangement of pressure and good to have at times. goodluck with your horse.

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