In summer of 1994 I interned at the Howell Living History Farm in New Jersey. The Howell Farm is a 501(c)3 organization operated under the auspices of the Mercer County Park Commission, about 15 minutes along the Delaware River north of Trenton. It is invested with the mission of providing the public with exposure to rural life and experience. This is done by depicting a working farm of the 1900-1910 period, a point in agricultural history characterized by nascent industrialization of the sector and a mixture of cultural practices and power sources, which include hand labor, steam and gasoline power, and draft animals.
Nested within this general setup is a ten-week intern program dedicated to training agricultural extension personnel in the basics of animal traction. This program was set up in the early 1980s by the farm administrator, Pete Watson, and a fellow Peace Corps veteran from West Africa, Dick Roosenberg, who now heads a technology-transfer and consulting NGO called Tillers International. The intern program is to an extent historically anomalous in that it uses oxen instead of horses for motive power, but this is on grounds that oxen are in virtually universal use in the developing world. Societies that use draft animals, past and present, almost universally use oxen and not horses. The horse is historically used by elite classes for luxury and military purposes; with few exceptions, modern draft horse breeds are descended from warhorses of the medieval period. The generic difference is that horses provide more speed, power, and ease of control, at the expense of capital and management inputs, ie costly harness and more careful feeding. The priorities of the program are otherwise consistent with the farm's historical depiction in that technical and farming practices in peripheral areas today are often a mixed bag, such as that found in the early twentieth century in the West.
The curriculum of experience there is broad. Four acres are cultivated in various crops, so a variety of drawn-implement and hand techniques are used. My co-intern and I fed and cared for our two Milking Devon oxen on a daily basis, and used them for all manner of fieldwork and other tasks such as cartage and powering a sweep gear. We repaired, modified, and used a horse-drawn sickle-bar mower and straddle-row cultivator, and helped with diverse farm maintenance and operational tasks such as haymaking. I even picked up some blacksmithing skills. We went on several field trips; one was to the Rodale Institute Research Center , another to an Agricultural Progress Day held on a Mennonite farm in Lancaster County where animal-drawn equipment of recent manufacture was being demonstrated. In mid-August, we went to the Northeast Organic Farming Assn (NOFA) conference at Hampshire College in Amherst, MA. These events were easily as valuable as the hands-on training itself. They allowed me to network and develop my survey to a considerable extent.
There is a fairly longstanding tradition of Howell Farm interns camping out beyond their nominal tenure; my trainer had come as an intern in 1990 and by '91 was running the program. It being the case that there were no recruits for the fall program, I more or less had the option of staying to help gather in the harvest but declined. On the one hand, I had agenda items that precluded staying, but on the other hand it wasn't an easy thing to turn my back on. Getting up in the morning to take care of our boys Frank and Jesse every day, brushing them, working with them in the fields, was a relationship much more profound than just having two pet cattle. I miss them still.