Last year at the Big E we were watching a friend’s crew unharness his 6-up and we asked how he kept all of his harness straight. He uses colored zip ties, one color for each horse. So after a couple stops on the way home we found some colored zip ties and assigned each horse a color. Now all harness, collar, bridles and team lines are color coded, plus with the addition of scoring some neon zip ties we have all of our different length lines color coded too. All of the colors and corresponding animals and lines are written on the harness shed wall. Except when father uses a team (some old dogs don’t acknowledge new systems) this method works really well for us.
Below are a couple photos. The team lines with Yellow and Pink are for Dan (yellow) and Annie (pink). We use team lines with a ring shortly after the cross line connection, this way we can snap in a pair of but lines of the appropriate length. Generally we use short butt lines on a fore-cart, disk, sulky plow or cultivator. However we often need longer butt lines for other tasks, the orange is 24′ for single horse cultivator, cultimulcher or the Leroy walking plow, the blue is for the Oliver walking plow or single twitching and the neon yellow is for the leaders of a 4 up. Nice and neat and so much easier to keep order in the harness shed.
