Rural Heritage December 2025/January 2026

suggestions as to the horse’s possibilities and point out those tasks at which the horse excels and those which he does less well. Though the horse, being flesh and blood, is subject to fatigue, he is immensely powerful for short durations, having a reserve power of about 10 times his normal working load. He is, therefore, very good at tasks which require only a moderate input of steady power, like pulling a hay rake or pulling a wagon, though he may draw upon huge reserves of strength in a sudden emergency. He is also very maneuverable and can handle himself in quite rugged terrain, so he is very useful for a job like skidding heavy logs out of tight places, even on steep slopes and over banks and bluffs. In fact, these handling qualities make the horse superior to any machine for the selective logging of certain designated trees, which he can extract with minimal damage to the remaining forest. Here in the

Arkansas, the last to abandon their horses and mules were the loggers, some of whom continued to use their animals until just a few years ago. Another job at which the horse excels is raking hay with a dump rake, my own favorite field implement. With a dump rake and two horses, one person can quickly rake the hay into windrows, then bunch it into large piles to be forked onto wagons and hauled away, or moved with a “buck rake” to be stacked in the field, sometimes with a stacker powered by one horse. On the small fields here in the Ozarks we even built “rake stacks,” dragging the hay in with the dump rake to a site where a couple of persons with pitchforks would build from the ground up a small, round stack with a pole in the center. At this kind of haying, a team of horses could actually outperform a small tractor, since they were more flexible and only required one operator.

A team pulling a springtooth harrow promotes tilth and avoids soil compaction a heavier tractor is likely to cause. Photo by Caleb Courteau

December 2025/January 2026

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