Alexia Allen

I use draft horses and ponies on my homestead. I get along well with them but there is a lot to learn. Please do not tie random animals to objects until you have some good training under your belt. I use a sled a lot, but using wheels has a significant advantage--I can get more work done with a smaller animal.

The best resource I know of is the Draft Animal Power Network.  I was just at their Field Days in New York and it's a great and encouraging organization.  They have a map with teachers around the world. Mostly horses, mules, and oxen.

Here's a Vimeo video of John Erskine, who lives near me and has been a huge help.  https://vimeo.com/showcase/2692792/video/76105043

Donn Hewes in NY is another great resource.

I love draft horses and find them a pleasure to be around.  If you don't love them, it's probably not worth keeping them.  Happy to talk draft equines with anyone if you want more specifics.

Alexia Allen
Hawthorn Farm in Woodinville, WA

There is some reputable research (SARE) that shellfish casings in the garden help deter the dread pest symphylans. Probably because the shells encourage a vigorous population of chitin-eating fungi, which intern make the environment uncomfortable for symphylans. Kind of like how you might avoid a lake that is especially thick with mosquitoes.

I wouldn't go especially far out of my way to come up with crab shell meal, but for my gardening clients who live on the coast--and in areas plagued by invasive green crabs that get caught by the boatload and donated freely to anyone who shows up on the dock--the crab meal has been a helpful tool to build soil fertility. Symphylans are no joke, and often the culprit behind poor garden performance in our Pacific Northwest soils.

Alexia Allen
Hawthorn Farm

Gianaclis Caldwell has written excellent books here in the States. I have a lot of cheese books but I reach for hers over and over. Mastering Artisan Cheesemaking I believe is her most cheese-focused. Each recipe is written for 2- and 12-gallon batches, perfect for me and my small goat/big cow situation. They are organized enough for me to find specific information quickly. I attribute this virtue to her, since many of the books by the brilliant authors at Chelsea Green Publishing are long rambles with very little organization.

Way to go! I love teaming up with horses.  A travois can be tricky over rough terrain as it torques wherever it is attached to the horse. I use plain farming harness and chain the log to the singletree. Driving horses is a little like flying an airplane in that there are a zillion straps and buckles, each one of them critical to the safety of the voyage.

No offense meant with this caution, but be careful training in harness. It's a rare equine who is safe and excellent to ride, pack, and drive. WHOA has to be solid (don't ask me how I know).  I've used Doc Hammill's videos with success, and am lucky to live within a few hours drive of another great old time mentor.

Check out the movie Somehow Hopeful for restorative forestry inspiration. Makes me want to get a bigger draft horse every time I watch it.

My Nigerian Dwarf dairy goats yield appreciable amounts of cashmere but they are from especially fuzzy bloodlines. And I have a teenage apprentice who loves to groom the goats and pick out the guard hairs, which is HOURS of labor I wouldn't do myself.  

Back when I had lots of goats and needed a buck, he had two Angora wethers to keep him company. I love mohair... But hadn't calculated that it would smell sooooo goaty from the buck humping his buddies all day long. Still made good socks, it was just a lot of fiber to keep up with (twice a year shearing and the resulting fiber prep and spinning and knitting, oof).

Have had a few Angora rabbits. If you saw my hair, you would understand that I am not a groomy sort of person. Plus Angora rabbit suits my fiber projects best when mixed with some other fiber.

Had a fiber horse for a while, a Bashkir Curly horse, the poodle of the horse world. Too itchy for spinning into yarn. Used it to reinforce clay plaster, but plaster colored like my pink armpit and full of curly black hairs? Not the look I wanted for my pizza oven. Now my ponies help my fiber life by puling a roll of wet felt, Mongolian-style.

I like sheep wool of certain breeds, and had my own sheep: Border Leicesters and Friesian dairy sheep. I was not a huge fan of the dairy wool but used it when I had it. I had the sheep for milk rather than wool.  But I like milking and raising goats better.  When raising lambs for meat I usually tanned the skins hair-on for sheepskin rugs rather than shear them.

The most economical way for me to get fiber now? Spread the word among local shepherds and get bags of gorgeous wool given to me, or I shear sheep for them in exchange for the wool. It helps that I happen to have a great pair of electric shears, and enough helpers to hold sheep while I shear. I get all the fleece I want to spin and felt that way.

Caring for the animals has been a fraction of the time it takes to process and use the resulting fiber.  I have learned to be careful what I wish for.

As for animal productivity, one question is, "Am I getting the maximum this species is capable of?" Another question is, "Am I getting enough final product to satisfy the effort I put in?" My goats are not wildly productive or fabulous examples of their breed, but they do it on what we can grow for them, and I like their company.  Keep me posted on how it goes for you!

Not exactly the solution to your issue, but my answer to a backup electrical source on my permaculture homestead: I am lucky to have a local university where teams of grad students are building me a treadmill that can charge a phone. Who walks on the treadmill? The miniature horse. Basically converting grass in the pasture to electrical energy. Once the design is all built, I am going to see if I can go a year using only the pony to charge my phone. She needs the exercise anyway!

I love caring for animals. I live with six other people, so if I am sick or away, they can help. They help already, daily. We have ponies, goats, chickens, ducks, rabbits, and barn cats. Milking the goats is the big thing that ties me down and is hard for other people to do. It is a labor of love.  And even the best farmsitter is not entirely reliable because we are all human.

If I were living alone I would get a friendly dog for company.

Students from a local university are building a treadmill for my miniature horse to walk on, so that she can generate electricity. It will be helpful for our long dark winters when our solar panels are slow. We are also on grid, so this is more of a "for fun and resilience" project. If I didn't already have and love the ponies, it would not make sense from an energy standpoint. The pony weighs 110 kilos, which is enough weight to generate quite a bit of juice on a slanted treadmill. One of the students is modifying a human treadmill for himself to generate electricity to be a backup power source for charging mobile etc. I would rather use my legs than turn a hand crank. And I guess I would rather use the pony's legs than my legs!

Feeding her through the winter is a challenge but here is the twist: the pony actually belongs to a friend of mine who pays for her food. So all I have to do is put in the time to train the pony, which is one of the most fun things to do for me anyways.

I'm not suggesting all these as viable options for you right now, Kaarina, just pointing out the ways we have answered similar questions. I like our answers, but we got here after 19 years of living at Hawthorn Farm!  Your place looks amazing and I also recommend taking it slow and accepting the various phases of your transition to country life.

We've been listing our forest on Hipcamp for three years now. It's booked solid weekends in the summer at $57 a night, and we could rent it more but we also run our own programs there. The ease of payment and people finding us makes Hipcamp's 10% commission totally worth it. We started with two sites at $20 each but had lots of people traveling cheap and it was double the hassle and coordination. We halved the sites and more than doubled the price, and as I noted, we're full most any summer days we care to rent it. Mysteriously the rentals drop off steeply in the winter... Though we do have a great covered yurt. Certainly covers the property taxes and the fire wood people use. While renting space doesn't scratch my "I'm a real farmer" itch, we do connect a lot of locals and travelers with a groovy permaculture-esque experience. It helps get more mileage out of our big raspberry beds, rabbit pens, cute goats and ponies... All the stuff we have anyway. And with 7 people living here full-time keeping an eye on things, having visitors has been manageable.

I second calls for good insurance. Hipcamp provides some, but only if you already have a solid homeowner's policy in place.

Notes from my situation, which won't work for everyone:

Yep, my prima donna goats (all bottle raised by me, two of them in the house before I learned better) will only go out accompanied on a goat walk. Which I prefer, because I can walk softly and carry a squirt gun if they nibble a tree I don't want them to eat. I use the time to gaze fondly at my landscape, take notes on next projects, scroll through my phone and post new goat videos (stack those functions!), prune, chat with visiting friends, or just sit in the grass and mope/daydream.

If I hide well enough in the house, they will go out with someone they trust, one of whom is fortunately my teenage apprentice who is a whiz with animals and knows what behavior to reinforce with a peanut-in-the-shell treat. The goats get walked only a few times a week to round out their diets. Of course they would prefer a twice-daily stroll followed by a refreshing cocktail and a massage.

Mostly our goats are fed with cut browse we bring to them. I have downsized to only 3 Nigerian Dwarf dairy goats, who form a key part of our homestead scene. Baby goats are basically adjunct faculty for our farm kids programs, so the goats carry their weight pretty well. We do make hay, including tree and nettle hay, but the goats do get supplemental alfalfa. Electric fence can work, but it takes some babysitting to train the goats to it. Because I have dairy goats I am reluctant to stress them out much. So basically we cater to their every need. I've mentioned it before, but providing free choice kelp meal made my goats WAY happier and less likely to test fences.

Good luck! I've put a Nubian or two in my freezer for being too loud and needy. I will say that my goats get easier to manage every year, as they get older and wiser and know the landscape better and better.

Alexia here from Hawthorn Farm, ears perked up by the no-grocery-store idea.

My husband Daniel and I did an entirely hand-harvested food year in 2017. We still grow the bulk of our calories (excuse me while I set down this mug of coffee). If we wanted salt, we went to the ocean and got sea water. Trade with friends for other hand-harvested food was legal. For example, friends brought us sidewalk lemons from their trips to California.  We had practiced increasingly long stretches of time doing this challenge for the previous 6 years, and our skills grew each year. So the actual year wasn't a big deal. But we did grow a wedding feast and get married that year! I was excited to get married, but eating an actual sweet maple syrup cake was also AWESOME. Big thanks to the friends who made maple syrup!

I had my own home-made rennet and cheese cultures, but ended up using bought culture and rennet because let's face it, my home-made rennet produced variable and sometimes gross cheese. I relegated that to the category of, "I could figure this out in a post-apocalyptic world, but I don't need to figure it out now."

I missed peanut butter occasionally. Trying to grow peanuts just fed the rats.

Simplicity rules. I have shifted away from trying to grow enough to replicate a grocery store diet, and be satisfied with simple foods. A baked squash. Steamed greens. A morsel of cheese and an apple. This has gotten easier as my soil improves--the food tastes better and is more satisfying.

The social aspect of a strict diet was the hardest part. "No thanks, I can't accept your muffins/homemade salsa/dinner invitation because I am on a random anachronistic strict diet." But the strictness was important to us, and made us take the challenge seriously. After all, most people throughout human history have eaten that way. It's well within human capacity. But it also highlights the ecosystem and actual ground and solar energy and fertility and time and muscular ability and attention needed to grow enough food to survive a year. That's going to be a different equation at other latitudes, but I can say that the challenge continues in a variety of ways here, and I continue to think daily about land-human relationships through the lens of food.

okay, picking up my coffee cup again... And happy to answer questions or have conversations with anyone interested. My life is devoted to beautiful food for everyone. I encourage everyone to take on whatever form of challenge suits them and helps them get where they want to go!