Draft Animal Power Podcast

Join Maggie and Jared in a conversation with Taylor Van Zyl, a professional carriage driver, horse trainer and trader, rodeo cowgirl and all-round horsewoman in Arizona. She travels up and down the West with eight Percherons, doing public and private events and rodeos. She tells us stories of flipping Gypsy Vanners, taking her carriage business to Hawaii, training all her horses to be ridden by a...

Anna Peck works with oxen in northern New York. She was kind enough to stay late in her office at work to record our interview. Anna has a unique story: raised by her sister, she started showing cattle and then oxen in high school on the Vermont-New York state line and fell in love with it, piecing together advice from various mentors to teach herself to train oxen. Lately, she prefers driving sin...

Claus Kropp has a the kind of job you only get it if you make it for yourself. He works as the founding director of the Lauresham Open-Air Laboratory at UNESCO Lorsch, a medieval abbey site in Germany. There, they have a full-scale model of a medieval village, filled with historically accurate buildings and animals. Claus works the land with his oxen and practices "experimental archaeology,&q...

We’ve got a slightly different type of episode this time around. Since registration is about to open for Draft Animal Power Field Days 2024, the podcast crew looked back at audio gathered at Field Days 2023 at Shelburne Farms, VT and created an audio collage of sorts. In a corner room of Shelburne Farms’ incredible Breeding Barn, I interviewed Jared Woodcock, Eric Westergard and Rick Eshuis. The i...

Jim and Maggie discuss logging with horses (which he started doing as a child, and went into business in right after high school), haymaking, setting high expectations for your animal-powered operation, working stallions, his equipment choices for the farm and log landing, and much more. As we discuss in the episode, Jim might be part of the minority in the draft power world at this point – he gre...

Maggie interviews Michael and Karma Glos of Kingbird Farm about why they use horse power in their organic market garden, the eras of horses on their farm (including their love for Fjords), marketing horsepower to the public (or not), the economics of draft power, and raising their child around animals. Join us at their kitchen table for this laugh-filled conversation (and please pardon their pet b...

Maggie Smith interviews her friend and mentor, Donn Hewes of Northland Sheep Farm. They discuss hay making equipment, horse (and teamster) training, mules, the Suffolk Punch breed, and the art of working with -- and building a life around  -- draft horses. Find out more about Donn, his farm and collaborations and teamster training opportunities, at https://www.northlandsheepdairy.com/.