Wakopa, Man. – Fertilizer and fuel prices may be sky high, but Tim Freeman isn’t worried.
He has two teams of hefty black Percherons that he is training to do all the work on his quarter section farm near Wakopa, Man.
Last week, one of his teams was pulling a newly restored No. 7 McCormick-Deering mower, all without the benefit of diesel. As for fertilizer, it drops to the ground every time the horses lift their tails.
And the high cost of machinery these days? At about $25 each, he figured that he might as well have three of those 1950s-vintage mowers, since spare parts come in handy.
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Freeman placed a classified ad in a local farm newspaper, and now his yard is filling up with equipment still in good condition, including a diverse range of tillage equipment, a hayrack and a John Deere side delivery rake with a fresh coat of green paint.
Can a person make a living farming the way his grandfather did?
“There’s people who do it,” said Freeman. “I think I could be one of them.”
Farming small may not be as profitable, he added, but the lower expenses mean less stress and worry. One farmer that he knows spent $18,000 on diesel in the month of August last year, and $30,000 for the whole year.
“With horses, you can work all day and it doesn’t cost you a penny,” he said.
After meeting his wife, Kathleen, at college, they married and bought the home quarter from her parents two years ago. As they move to full-time farming, he plans to continue working at a nearby hog barn.
This past summer, Freeman has been on paternity leave after the youngest of his four sons was born.
Growing up in Nova Scotia, Freeman was always interested in horses, but never thought they would be a big part of his life. That changed two years ago after his wife arranged for them to go on a wagon ride at a neighbour’s place on his 30th birthday.
“I was sitting up with him and he asked me if I had ever driven before. I said ‘no, but I’d sure like to.’
“I thought he was just going to hand me the lines. He said, ‘maybe I should give you a team for the winter.’ “
Freeman drove that team for a year and a half and then bought his own. He added a second team this spring.
But the learning curve has been a steep one for man and horses, and not without mishaps. After making a new wooden pitman arm, and replacing the guards and sickle blades on the mower knife, Freeman hitched up the team and headed out to do a bit of mowing.
“I started the two year olds out on it and apart from a little dancing, they started going really good,” he said.
The other team, however, was not so easily convinced.
Halfway to the hay field, the horses bolted and Freeman was pitched forward out of the seat. The mower went over top of him and the horses ran all the way to the Hutterite colony down the road.
“They went up over the hill, through the ditch and skimmed off the trees. They broke the shear bolt on the axle.”
Undaunted, Freeman took the cutterbar off the broken mower and put it on one of his backups and got back to work. On a good day, he figures it would be possible to drop 10 acres of hay with a team of horses.
The old mowers are ground driven, so there’s no motor to make a deafening roar, just a tickety-tock sound. When he lets the horses rest, there’s nothing but the sound of the wind blowing across the Prairies, Freeman said.
“It’s too bad so many of them went to scrap.”
