Learning at Mill Swamp Indian Horses Is More Than Just Horsemanship

It's understanding the complex role that microbial enhancement plays in building healthy soils and livestock.

It's understanding  livestock instead of ridiculously anthropomorphizing them.

It's hands-on learning. Here Lydia is both teaching and learning as she demonstrates how to shear her first sheep, a rare Hog Island ram. Participants have been cleaning, carding,and making the wool into yarn since then.

It's learning to work together to solve problems and achieve goals.

It's inter generational learning. Cannon is learning about native planting practices and early colonial farming. Moments before doing so participants listened in as Daddy, age 82, one of the last men alive in our area who worked horses in the field in an actual farm operation talked, about how those horses were worked and cared for.

It is a chance to learn to play and perform Americana and Roots music on a variety of instruments.

It's learning the role of affection and communication in building real relationships with animals.

But most importantly, it's learning truths that are not otherwise self evident in the shallow, empty existence that this century presents to us. It's learning that putting the interests of others above the interests of oneself  is the first step to living an ethical life. It's learning that reality always matters and that appearance never does.

It's learning that the most obscene of all  four letter words is the word "mine."

Our First 46 Mile Ride

It was probably 2008. I am not sure. Lido was still living. I do not remember a lot of the details. I remember that Swimmer had been under saddle for twenty days when she took this ride.

It was an all day affair. We rode at a very casual pace. It was not a race and we were not keeping time.

We were exploring, not the geography, but ourselves and our horses. We were finding out what we could do and what our horses could do. We found out that one 46 mile ride did wonders to teach horses to become safe and steady trail mounts.

Looking back over the history of our program, it might have been the most important ride that we ever took. We learned that our horses could go forever and little riders could go further than they thought, than their parents thought, and than the established horse world thought.

Modern, hover parenting steals something very important from children. It steals the opportunity to rack up successes from them. Our program constantly seeks to give opportunities for success to kids (and grown ups too). Real challenges, real successes where the reward is more than a strip of cloth.

Containing Pasture Runoff

America spends so much of its time licking the boots of the oil industry that our vision gets distorted when it comes to environmental-agricultural policies. The runoff that is lethal to our waterways comes primarily from the use of chemical pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers. Oil and chemical interests have been very successful at distracting us from what should be our goal, the radical decrease in the use of poisons in agriculture, and focusing on the removal of manure from pastures.

It has been an easy target for them. Manure is visible to the eye and obvious to the nose. Chemical fertilizers and herbicides that destroy microbial life under the ground carry on there carnage in complete darkness. We cannot see the beneficial microbes when they are alive so we cannot directly see when they are destroyed.

But we can see the results.

Modern chemical farming reduces dirt to simply being the equivalent of plant holders. Our field's only purpose is to hold, for a very brief period of time, the fertilizers and poisons that we put on the soil each spring. The microbial life, and the earthworms that can generate plant growth perpetually, without the addition of chemicals and poison, are destroyed.

That leaves us with  a barren desert beneath the surface.

Permaculture principles can reverse this carnage in less than a decade. By simply ceasing to use any chemicals on a pasture we can increase microbial life to the point that manure is quickly absorbed in to the soil and transformed into the nutrients that pastures require. Simply pushing up slight berms around the low spots in pastures, coupled with the judicious use of swales and water retention areas, along with keeping residue of ivermectin from pastures can nearly eliminate rain water runoff in pastures that are on flat land.

Those passive steps will yield tremendous benefits. When they are coupled with a more active approach to regenerative agriculture, the benefits multiply beyond what I ever imagined possible. Multi species grazing (including poultry), application of microbial fertilizer, application of vermicompost and colonization of composting worms along with management practices that reduce soil compaction will create super soil. Soil so biologically active it will quickly breakdown horse manure and convert it to useful plant nutrients is a gift that keeps on giving. With each growing season the pastures become stronger and more alive.

And near by water ways become cleaner. And manure breaks down in pastures so fast that it is often barely visible. And your horses will be healthier. And you will be taking carbon out of the atmosphere and putting it in the soil.

And you will become a steward of the land instead of continuing on as its primary enemy.

So Stop Being A Novice

We do horses and people a tremendous disservice by pretending that natural horsemanship and riding are complex topics that take years to learn. Instructors in every field, from theology to fiddle playing.  often advance the myth that the subject matter is so complex that only the chosen few can understand.

The reality is that riding is simple. A person in good physical health can learn to ride in short order after they master the natural anxiety that riding brings on. One learns to ride by riding, and riding, and riding, and then riding more.

Natural horsemanship requires one to learn several counter intuitive concepts to understand a horse's thoughts and motivations. It is the concepts that matter, not the individual techniques. One could spend the rest of one's life  learning specific techniques and not remotely master natural horsemanship without the understanding of those basic concepts. On the other hand, one who understands the concepts can improvise and develop techniques.

Pressure and release, prey animal and predator, the need for security versus the need for autonomy--these simple concepts hold the key to having a relationship with a horse that is based on something other than fear and fairy tales

Preserving and Promoting the Marsh Tacky

Our primary focus is on preserving the Bankers, a strain of Colonial Spanish Horse from the Outer Banks of North Carolina. However, we also work to preserve and promote the Marsh Tacky, the State Horse of South Carolina. Our program owns two Marsh Tacky mares and Andrew, pictured above with his colt, Pagan, owns a mare, a stallion, and this foal.

The Marsh Tacky is a horse of tremendous historical significance. Southern patriot militia and regular forces during the Revolution used these horses, among others, to slow down Cornwallis' march north and contributed to his ultimate surrender at Yorktown.