Current Enewsletter

Vol 14, Number 3, MArch 2024

There are certain things that make spring unique from the other seasons of Vermont. In my industry, the number one thing is the volatile ground and road conditions. You can go from frozen stiff as a board to making new pollywog ponds in the matter of 24 hours. This year someone let the cat out of the mud hole earlier than I can ever remember. Lucky for me my landing was 100 ft of pavement so anything I could pile up could get shipped with ease after all the backroads were posted and shut down for the season. What a lucky luxury. The other thing that comes with spring is new life. I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to take a trip out to Daviess county Indiana and purchase a new 11 YO Gelding for myself. Quite exciting to have big boy Ted in the barn! ----> Read about it 

DAPNet has been making big moves for this spring. We have been working with an outside team of brand specialists; David Covell, Neil Madsen Ryan and Jason Martin. The goal of hiring this crew was to look into our marketing and branding of the organization. Answering questions like: what does DAPNet mean to our membership and community at large? Where are we going from here? and what does that look like internally?  

David’s design work has already been displayed at the 2023 DAPFD in the form of our sponsorship banners, event program and maps. Jason was our photographer at the Field Days and many of the new pictures that we are presenting came from him. Neil has been working behind the scenes with us on our brand language and solidifying a unified message for what DAPNet represents.

Our new brand identity
We are very excited to debut the banner you see at the top of this Newsletter. This locks up our new logo and branding style. Although we love DAPNet’s eras of logos for our organization, there were always type issues and sizing and wording issues, especially when you put them onto merchandise.

Our new identity will take us into the future boldly as our community grows.

Here are some thoughts from David 
“The forms of both draft and oxen yokes come together to create our new symbol we call the Yoke Mandela. It is designed to evoke the coming together of community, the power of our network, and is reminiscent of the hex signs seen on the barns in parts of rural America. 

Both Hex signs and Mandelas are known to symbolize balance in nature, with hex signs specifically thought to augment fertility of livestock and encourage the right balance of sun and rain for successful crops. May it be so! 

Our new logotype is inspired by the earthy fonts found on classic journals like The Whole Earth Catalog and the Foxfire Book series. It is bold and strong like the animals we work with but as welcoming as our community.”

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Below in our Newsletter you will read an article from director and chair of DAPNet’s communication committee, Maggie Smith, who visited Cuba and brought back photos of the active agrarian and commerce that is using live power on the island. 

2024 Plow Day and Workshop is right around the corner where we will be breaking ground on our 2024 DAPFD location. Come join the group Friday afternoon for a modest entry fee or just come enjoy the sights of plowing ground Saturday. Details below.

Speaking of 2024 Draft Animal Power Field Days!!! We are still looking for artist entry for the key art for the event. Find entry details below.

Furthermore our sponsorships for DAPFD 2024 are LIVE! Help us make this great educational conference happen by becoming a sponsor for the 2024 DAPFD. 

One last thing that I NEED to mention here. The team of volunteers put in a huge effort to bring this Enews to you. Often some things don’t make the deadline and get kicked down the road to the next Enews. But this one is very exciting and we won’t be waiting that long to debut our new Draft Animal Power Podcast! Thanks to Maggie Smith and Louis Menard we are ready to launch the newest adventure for DAPNet as an organization. Look out for an Eblast in the next week or so and listen up. Our first episode features Donn Hewes of Northland Sheep Farm in Marathon NY. Maggie and Donn discuss hay making equipment, training, mules, the Suffolk Punch horse, and the art of working with draft horses.

Thank You            
John Smolinsky, DAPNet president

Plow Day and Workshop  

2024 Draft Animal Power Spring Plow Day! The Draft Animal Power Network is breaking ground in New York for our 2024 Draft Animal Power Field Days. The Spring Plow Days event will be held at Stockade Equestrian, 505 Sacandaga Rd Glenville, NY 12303 (Rain date April 27th).

Friday, April 19th For those interested in the technical aspect of plowing with draft animals. We will be having a plow workshop at Stockade from 1:00 pm to 5:00 pm on Friday, April 19th. Learn how a few different plows work, how to adjust and hitch to them properly, and what to look for when buying a plow. The fee for this workshop is $25.00 

Saturday, April 20th from 9:00 am to 3:00 pm Plow Day; we will be using draft animals to plow, finish, and seed a cover crop that will prepare a plot for our September Draft Animal Power Field Days. Saturday is FREE!

Things to know!

• There will be no food vendors,

• bring a chair and a picnic or bagged lunch

• The grounds are a beautiful place for a spring picnic.

Draft Animal Power Alive and Well in Cuba

By Maggie Smith

I had the good fortune to take a two week trip to Cuba in February. My partner and I rented touring bicycles in Havana and headed westward to Vinales, through t̗̗he state of Artemisa and into Pinar del Rio, one of the world’s premier tobacco-growing regions. We then returned to Havana by bus, joined up with his father, and biked east along the industrial coast to the beach town of Playa Jibacoa and back. Everywhere, we saw animals at work. 

Horses were mainly used for road transport. I heard of their use in the field, but didn’t see it. This was a snazzy cart in a tourist town, but generally the carts they pulled were two-wheeled, with homemade beds and car wheels as seen here. Harness varied widely, sometimes involving collars, sometimes just a wide breast strap. Many horses wore blinders but many did not. Horses were almost always hooked solo in the regions we traveled, and mostly driven rather than ridden. When I saw people riding (other than tourists) it was generally bareback. Lines were always made of thick twisted rope. The horses in general looked quite thin and their coats were often patchy. 

Oxen, on the other hand, always looked great. Being a more horse-oriented person myself, I may not be one to judge, but these cattle were beautiful. The oxen, or bueyes, used for work more closely resembled Bos indicus (the Asian cattle subspecies also known as the zebu) than our North American cattle (primarily Bos taurus). They are very heat tolerant, with large humps on their backs, abundant dewlaps, and great curving horns (which were often sawn short). On a lovely morning just below the beautiful hill town of Soroa, we stopped to talk with some farmers planting yucca. I snapped these two photos. Leandro, the farm owner, was kind enough to shoot the breeze with us for a while. We told him we were farmers in New York, and compared notes on agriculture. His farm was rather special due to its large size (probably around 30 acres) and had been in his family for several generations already, since Castro’s agricultural reform in the early ‘60s. 

While we talked, one employee plowed gorgeous straight trenches in the deep, red soil with the oxen yoked quite far apart, I assume for better visibility. Another cut and dropped sections of yucca root at intervals in the trenches, and a third methodically covered the roots with a hoe and stepped on the soil to firm it. My Spanish was not good enough to inquire about the finer points of draft powered agriculture, sadly, or I would have asked more questions: about the lines to the oxen’s nose rings, which the drover held but did not seem to use much, or about the voice commands, the simple wide yoke, the implement (basically a walking plow with a middlebuster-type share). The team walked at a beautifully slow pace but they had already covered a half acre or so that morning and Leandro gestured to the surrounding fields, explaining they’d planted an acre or so of boniato (sweet potato) yesterday. They were cultivating basically as far as the eye could see with two teams of oxen. When we asked when they started this morning, he laughed and told us he didn’t know, but it was dark. Better to start early and rest in the middle of the day. 

Biking down the road during siesta hours allowed ample opportunities to see oxen staked out to graze. I studied the permanent nosering-and-rope apparatus on the ox’s head, which the lines clipped to for work, and appreciated the content-looking bovines.

A walk through the countryside surrounding Vinales afforded some closer looks at simple homemade farm equipment. 

Check out this gorgeous diversified farm. Row crops on the right, tobacco drying on the left, livestock grazing, and a farmer with a cart behind his oxen, hidden from the camera view. But it wasn’t always this way.

By the time the Soviet Union fell in 1991, Cuban agriculture was highly mechanized and petroleum-dependent. But the so-called Periodo Especial changed all that. All of a sudden, gone was the free oil the USSR had been supplying, and the revenue Cuba gained from selling the excess oil at profit. Agriculture had to diversify, multiply, and find an alternative source of traction. With the quality of government-supplied food rations plummeting and prices skyrocketing, ordinary Cubans began to clean up abandoned lots and plant gardens. The government invited Australian permaculture experts to Cuba in 1994 to teach organic and silviculture principles. What ensued was essentially a mass, forced transition to organic animal-powered agriculture. The Special Period is considered to have ended in 2000, when Venezuela began supplying Cuba with oil, but the agricultural changes seem to have mostly stuck. Today, Cuba produces around 80% of its food. From what we saw on our two-week trip, the vegetables, fruit, rice, beans, starchy tubers and corn that Cubans eat, and the tobacco they smoke, is pretty much all local and largely organic. 

Since the pandemic, Cuba has been experiencing the worst economic recession since the ‘90s – people told us that inflation was a gobstopping 50%. People are going hungry, and life is very hard for average Cubans right now. But everywhere we went in Cuba, rural people seemed better off, especially those with a smallholding and a team of bueyes. A farmer named Javier, in the beach town of Playa Jibacoa, seemed to consider his way of life pretty much perfect. He shared a team of oxen with a neighbor, working on both the neighbor’s and his own land to cultivate row crops and what we’d call in the U.S. a “food forest.” He explained that selling your homegrown produce around town was the best marketing strategy; any deal you might cut with el estado wouldn’t be profitable and working on a government-owned farm pays a pittance. A farmer in Vinales described to us how the restaurant buyers in that bustling tourist town come out to his land to buy the vegetables he grows, allowing him to spend all his time working the field with his oxen and managing extensive irrigated raised beds of lettuce, radishes and herbs. Imagine that!

I would love to return to Cuba with a better grasp of Spanish so I could talk more with these small-scale farmers. But from my perspective, given the economic situation and the relative ease of keeping livestock there, it seems like draft animals are an appropriate technology working well within the Cuban agricultural landscape.

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March Updates from DAPNet

Executive Committee
During our Excomm meeting this month, we realized we wanted to recognize the awesome work that our (mostly) silent partner, Morning Ag Clips, does for all of us at DAPNet.  (Because we love an acronym, we call them MAC.)  They efficiently and adeptly do the bookkeeping, the administrative tasks, mail out orders, help keep us all on schedule, and grace us with their presence at Field Days.  DAPNet had an excellent 2024 membership drive and amazing 2023 annual appeal thanks to our dedicated membership and also thanks to all the work that MAC does behind the scenes.  So Excomm wants to give a shout out to the work of Kate, Christa, Margaret, Jessica, and everyone else at MAC who helps us make the DAPmagic!

Communications Committee
Several Comm Comm members were in Germany this month for the World Draft Cattle Symposium, representing DAPNet and learning from practitioners from all around the world! Stay tuned for dispatches from UNESCO Lorsche, where they fraternized with the who’s who of oxen. We also put together another pretty darn good newsletter this month if we do say so ourselves. And our design team is putting together artwork for our podcast launch. 

Events Committee
It’s never too early to start thinking about Field Days!  We always are!  The events committee is busy preparing for the Spring Plow Day which will prepare the ground for the 2024 Draft Animal Power Field Days (2024 DAPFD). (More info in this newsletter and also on our website https://www.draftanimalpower.org/registration/2024-draft-animal-power-plow-day) We are also beginning our search for sponsors for the 2024  DAPFD. Do you know a business or person that could sponsor our Field Days? https://www.draftanimalpower.org/registration 

Finance and Fundraising Committee
The Finance and Fundraising Committee is working together with our graphic design team to create a fundraising deck so that we as an organization can do better fundraising. We are working on finding and  applying for grants to get funding to bring different types of folks to the 2024 Draft Animal Power Field Days. If you find grants that you think would be a good fit for our organization or have experience writing grants and would like to lend a hand in the “fun-raising” process, send us a message.

Classifieds

Are you selling or in search of something draft related? Harness, equipment, or even draft animals? Or maybe you’re offering a job position or apprenticeship? Email your ad to dapnetinfo@gmail.com and we’ll put it in the next newsletter.

For Sale: BOA Boot size 8 pair, used once, asking $75 
7 3/8-1/2” wide x 7 3/8-7/8” long
Contact Reva Seybolt at revabseybolt@att.net

For Sale: Logging collar and pad for sale- 20" like new Coblentz 550 heavy duty logging collar, and a new never used thinner vinyl and waffle neoprene collar pad, $225, can be seen April 20th at out Plow Day. Will ship at buyers expense. Contact Erika Marczak at erikamarczak60@gmail.com

Events

Have a draft animal related event you’d like to see on this calendar?? Fill out our Events Submission Form and we’ll make sure to add your event to our calendar!

Welcome to the DAPMap

Check out our new map entries!

Kuhnweiler Hof- PhD written on modern draft horse use in organic farming; international networking; still engaged in science concerning draft animal use. Email them atkuhnweiler.hof@t-online.de. Phone number +49 176 41707475.

Attelages Bovins d'Aujourd'hui- Blog which brings together as much information as possible on cattle driving in France: Addresses, craftsmen, videos, technical documents, archives, announcements, news, training. Contact them through theiremail.Check out their website here.

Have an idea for content for the newsletter? Send it to us!

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Looking for the discussion forums from the previous website? Click here!