Natural Horsemanship, Kids and Safety

In 2019 the cumulative recorded miles ridden by our students and participants was just over 4,000 miles. To put that in perspective, that is a distance further than from Norfolk to Oslo, Norway. Not one inch of those miles was in a sandy arena. These miles were on trails in the woods and in woods where there were no trails.

The majority of our horses were either born wild or are just a generation or two from the wild.

Our safety record is impeccable. The number of horse related injuries received by our young riders is infinitesimal. The reasons are not obvious to an untrained eye.

Our horses live in herds or bands, with the exception of most of the stallions, who have their own paddocks. They do not eat sugar and few of them eat anything but grass, forbs, and hay. This lifestyle produces content horses who do not exist at the level of constant, low level stress that do those who live in stables. Our horses live outside 24/7.

In short, allowing the horses to live as close as possible to a natural state makes them much safer to be around.

Our students learn natural horsemanship. They learn to understand horses. They learn to use their bodies to effectively communicate with horses. They learn not to fear horses. They learn to train horses.

In short, allowing the students to learn to interact with horses in a manner that is most natural to the horses makes our students much safer to be around.

I am not a hand wringing, worrier, but I believe that I would be concerned about the safety of my child if that child were in a riding program that did not teach natural horsemanship.

In Just One Week.....

We had additional Spanish goats born....

Boy Scouts and program participant and a few other volunteers cleared several acres of Jacob's Woods as we convert it to silvopasture.

We brought home two yearling Leicester ewes to go with our Hog Island Ram, Lincoln.

Arlo, our buff orpington drake. is no longer alone. Ella put an Indian Runner hen in with him.

Galen is taking her riding to the next level.....

And Pam worked hours on the record keeping and registration of horses in our program...and Brooke set up a very productive meeting with officials from our local school board to develop programs with their agriculture students...and, we got some great news on a grant proposal submitted last fall...and we developed two new vermicomposting sites using night crawlers instead of red wigglers...and Wendell developed what he termed a "free range" worm operation using "wild" worms, manure, and low spots on the soil,... and I was accepted in the Virginia Master Naturalist Program,... and I spent half of a day showing our regenerative agriculture programs to a young lady who will soon have her own pasture program to manage...and.....

Terry has been back to the horse lot and will be in the saddle very, very soon!

Time To De-Worm Your Horses and Worm Your Pastures

Earth worms, night crawlers, and composting worms are among the best companion animals for your horses. These worms work hard without strict supervision or micromanagement. Do not fall into the trap of treating a worm bin like a neo-natal intensive care unit. Though social media teaches other wise, worms get along just fine without humans wringing their hands over what the perfect bedding is for a worm bin.

Get a large container that will drain--fill it with manure that is not recently contaminated with ivermectin. Either dig your own or order worms--(I am very happy with the worms that I get from Uncle Jim's Worm Farm) Keep adding manure. Don't worry about constant turning like one would do with a regular compost program. In a vermiculture system the worms do the turning and churning.

The more different kinds of manure that you put in the bin the better--except that there is no reason to use dog manure or any other meat eater's manure.

Humans can pick up parasites from dog manure.

During the months that your worms are working for you, learn about compost teas. I use them some but find that simply injecting the vermicompost in shallow holes spaced across a pasture works great to spread the microbes into the soil provided that the soil is moist.

Parasitic worms cost us tremendous amounts of money annually, both in treating the worms and in the amount of extra hay that the horses must eat to feed themselves and their parasite loads. During the years that I raised only a handful of foals and nearly every horse in the herd was adult to middle aged, we had very little problem with parasites. Now our herd has aged and we are raising a lot of foals.

The result is a radical increase in parasites. Foals and old horses are worm factories. As one's pasture reaches full capacity of dung beetles, microbes and earth worms one will see a reduction in parasites.

Such a regimen, coupled with a complete refusal to use modern chemical fertilizers or other poisons on the soil, and a strict planting program that keeps winter annual grasses  growing will improve the health of your soil and your horses.

On Building A Culture Of Givers

             "When I was younger, I had big visions of changing the world."---Rick Danko

The cynics and the self absorbed seek to divide us into a culture of what they have designated as a culture of "makers and takers." We are allowing our children to be raised in a nation that ignores reality and acts as if there are such things as "alternative facts." Character, honor, and integrity are simply not taught or valued. We treat them as forgotten relics of the past--the equivalent of an abacus--useful for its time, but of no significance today.

It need not be this way. There are no small kindnesses. There are no little contributions to a better world. There are no incremental changes. Such dismissive language masks efforts to "tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world," to use Robert Kennedy's adaptation of ancient Greek wisdom.

Every kindness is enormous. Every contribution is significant. And "incremental change" is still change. 

This photo is of a group of Scouts, program participants and volunteers who worked tirelessly yesterday thinning the timber and building wildlife habitat on the silvopasture that we are developing by hand on about fifteen acres of fifty year old mixed timber.

Our program will benefit tremendously from the new silvopasture, but it is the kids in this picture who stand to benefit the most. None could afford to give such a large financial contribution that we could hire professionals to clear the land, but each could afford to give of their time and effort to get the job done.

As they get older they will be able to make more of an impact with their contributions to the effort to make gentle the life of this world.

We have no paid staff. Everyone is a volunteer. We have never turned a family away for inability  to pay program fees. Our business model and planning development models would appall any business school graduate. 

Our program is driven by experience, memories , and strong examples. Our business model is based on the fact that as Momma lay dying  of cancer, she made sure that there was food in the freezer that was on her porch so that anyone in the neighborhood who could not afford food for their family could simply stop by and get what they needed. 

"When we were young we thought we could save the world. Now we are here to help out in the neighborhood."-----Rick Danko

Train Your Horse from the Ground Up. Build Your Pastures From the Ground Down.

Yesterday was a big day for our program. Today will be even bigger and it is days like yesterday and today that will give us tomorrows.

In a miserable wind yesterday,several families of kids spent the morning developing a new vermiculture site for the program. We used horse manure, poultry manure, rabbit manure, some old hay, and "wild" worms that are living in the soil here at the horse lot. We experimented by adding some commercial organic microbes to the mixture along with a bit of vermicompost from our largest worm program.

There will not be a lot happening until spring when the microbes are warm enough to take off growing, but then the mixture will quickly be converted to the "starter batch" that helps increase the amount of microbes in our pastures.

These microbes will fight soil compaction in the pastures. The best way that we can reduce soil compaction is to reduce the number of animal units per acre. That means either fewer animals or more land.

We opt for more land. 

Toward that end we are converting about fifteen acres of mixed forest into silvopasture. The land has not been cut since at least 1970. I am removing nearly everything but for large pines and some select large  hardwoods.  Looking to leave about 75 trees to the acre. In the process I am removing many thousands of wild blue berry shrubs that will sprout out in the spring providing additional forage.

For the first year we might have to simply allow the native grasses in the seed bank to take root but eventually it will be a strong mixture of wild life friendly grasses and forbs. The brush is being piled into lengthy brush piles for wild life habitat.

Today area Scouts will be out helping our program participants build that wild life habitat. In an hour the sun will be up enough for me to resume cutting.

We will be taking before and after pictures from today's efforts.