Rural Heritage April/May 2026

Becky Frye with Donn Hewes on the “Horse-Powered Tractor.”

Cultivation is another way that draft horses make my farm more efficient. My straddle-row cultivator is a versatile tool with shovels, knives and discs that can be placed in any number of arrangements. It’s very fun to ride around on and zip through tasks, but the work is done more effiectively (and fewer crop plants die) when driving slowly and steadily. While the McCormick Deering is a blast to use, single-horse cultivation of pathways is where we really shine. Our favorite implements are two old single-horse cultivators – one with spikes and the other with shovels. We do use the I&J single-horse cultivator with S tines, but it bounces around too much on our rocky ground to be effective. The next step for “mechanizing” my farm is to begin using a sickle bar mower to harvest leaf crops

like Lemon Balm. A 6-foot bar cuts the 60-inch bed perfectly, turning what would be three hours of hand harvesting into 20 minutes and one pass with the mower. For this to work, I have to alter my bed layout so the horses have a place to walk without trampling the adjacent crop, a drawback to this system. This description of my farm sounds great, but in real life it’s much messier. Yup, I’ve got beds of weeds I can’t cultivate with horses because the crops themselves are 4 feet tall. Yes, I still have to hoe in-row weeds and transplant by hand. But I can drag those flats of plants to the garden with a horse. I can move bales of mulch with a horse and haul harvested roots to be washed. Sure beats doing it by hand.

April/May 2026

65