By Horse and by Hand

Working a farm with draft horses is a joy for the senses: birds singing, insects buzzing, and the squeaking and rattling of the iron tedder; the scent of drying grass and the tang of horses’ sweat. Frank Hunter’s 70-years-old equipment may not do a perfect job, but he’s satisfied with the result: “I saved myself another tank of gasoline today.”

Working the land of Hillside Springs Farm in Westmoreland, New Hampshire with horses means a lot of extra physical work for the farmer: grooming, harnessing, hitching to the cumbersome, heavy plow, disk, cultivator, mower, tedder, or hay-wagon; and then driving the horses.

“Ho Team! Walk Team! You’re hurting my hands!” Frank tries to slow down black Percheron Ben, 21, who was born on the farm, and brown Brabant/American Belgian cross Clyde, 19, who joined the small herd of four only two years ago.

They’re not the ideal team. Ben is afraid of Clyde, dislikes working with him, and shows it by trying to keep his distance from his partner – hard to do when you’re both hitched to the same neckyoke. Ben prefers to work with the only mare on the farm, Molly, 24, but she already mowed grass yesterday and so gets to rest, together with her retired half-brother Moon, 26, another caramel brown Belgian.

After tedding the hay in a sloping, sunny field, Ben and Clyde are eager to go back to their shady barn. Frank holds on to the leather lines, putting the weight of his slight body behind his pull-back as well. When that doesn’t slow the animals down, he makes them stop halfway to get their attention.

Frank Hunter and Kim Peavey started Hillside Springs Farm in 2002. On 3 acres they grow over 100 varieties of vegetables, herbs, flowers, and mushrooms. The farm also produces freshly pressed apple cider. They only use sustainable, organic, and biodynamic farming methods, though the farm is not certified.

Every week, during harvest season, early June to late November, 50 families  who subscribe to the farm’s Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program pick up their vegetables and fruits on the farm or at the farmers’ market in the nearby town of Keene. Because CSA members pay for their seasonal food upfront, they help the farmers to finance the growing season, and share the odds in the gamble with nature that agriculture is – especially in these days of climate-change. CSA also removes costs of shipping, marketing, and packaging, and freshly picked, locally grown vegetables still have all their flavor, vitamins, and minerals.

Kim and Frank like to be transparent about their way of farming: “The ongoing relationship between farmers, CSA members, and the farmland allows us all to understand what's happening on the farm without a third-party certification process,” they explain on their website. "Members have the opportunity to observe, ask questions, and even pitch in!”

We got herbicided every spring

Frank, 53, grew up in suburban Philadelphia. “I didn’t have any farming in my background. It was probably a 45 minute drive to the nearest farm.” He majored in environmental studies at Prescott College in Arizona. “I took an organic agriculture class; it didn’t get me really excited. But I got interested in botany.” And he knew: “There’s no way I’m gonna sit down and get a Ph.D. I've got to go to the plants all day!”

Frank managed a native plants nursery outside of Philadelphia for two years. After that, he worked as an apprentice on a CSA farm in Morristown, New Jersey, where Kim was a volunteer. Kim, 55, says, “I was working part time at the library of Drew University in Madison, NJ, where I went to school, but I wanted to do some outside work too.” She grew up on a family dairy farm in central New York State and studied literature, theology, and environmental issues.

After Morristown, Frank worked for three years at Kimberton CSA, a 10 acre vegetable farm in Pennsylvania. Kim joined him there once she got her degree, returning to her farming roots, although to her, coming from a dairy farm, it didn’t feel like that at first: “We were fairly new in our relationship when the head farmer said to Frank: ‘You and Kim are gonna be farming together?’ I said: 'This isn’t farming, this is gardening!'  But I’ve come around to believing that this is really farming. Gardening is for your kitchen, as opposed to growing for other people.”

While at Kimberton, Kim did a fair amount of horseback riding, and for a year Frank took some lessons with her. He wanted to start farming with horses. They went on to intern at a draft horse farm in the Catskill Mountains, where Frank got a good foundation for horse work. He's always been the teamster. As Kim says, "I made some efforts in the beginning, but the horses are so big and jostling.”

Frank mentions, “Then Kim was with child.”

Kim laughs: “I was! That’s when we went to Ithaca,” where they rented ten acres. Frank: "We put up a greenhouse, bought machinery, and had a small vegetable garden.” They also had their first team of horses, their first twelve CSA members, and were building a family. Their daughter Gwen was born there and they liked the area in New York State.

Frank: “The soil is good, it’s a farming community still, even if it’s Big Ag.”

Kim: “Big corn and soybeans and massive dairy farms, ten thousand cow farms. With all the herbicides and pesticides.”

Frank: “We got herbicided every spring.”

Kim: “We were in the organics buffer, but still, we were surrounded. Right in the spring, when we needed to be out planting, that’s when all the spraying was being done. We had a little baby and our horses.”

Frank: “I got headaches and swollen glands. And we couldn’t just go inside, we had to work. The second year we ended up leaving the farm.”

Seven Springs

They drew a circle on the map around Kim’s parents’ farm in upstate New York, deciding they wanted to be within four hours of her folks. They went looking for places that had a Waldorf school, for Gwen, but also thinking a community with such a school might be interested in the organic and biodynamic farming methods they use. In January 2002, they moved to New Hampshire.

Kim: “The farm wasn't named when we came, but not long after we moved here, we had a visit from Winston Staples, 97 years old, who grew up here and told us all about the barn that used to be across the road and the rosebush his mother planted, which is still here, and how they sold everything from a quart of cream to a quart of strawberries for a quarter. We asked if the farm had had a name then, and it did: Hillside Springs Farm. Supposedly there are seven springs. Our well is definitely spring fed, along with the irrigation pond.”

Back in the day, the property was a dairy farm. But the fields where the cows grazed were barely recognizable any more. Frank: “35 acres, it was almost all woods when we bought it. Anywhere there’s a stone wall, that was a field then. We had to see the potential. But we had our soil: sandy silt loam.”

Kim: “The kind of land that we would need to grow vegetables on with horses.”

Frank: “I would say, the first three years we were always wondering whether this was the right decision. And really, you have to build the soil up, it’s not like instant productivity. Organic practices aren’t like chemical fertilizers that are soluble, which means you get fertility right away.”

The good company of horses

The farm is entirely horse-and-hand-powered. The bed spacing is set up with the horses in mind. They plow, disk, harrow, spread compost, make beds, cultivate the garden and help put up loose hay and firewood. Horses are easier on the soil, cause less compaction, and can work better in wet conditions than a tractor.

“The horses give us the opportunity to have a working partnership with animals that is rare and vital these days,” the farmers write on their website, “and we greatly enjoy their good company!”

Frank: “If we just wanted to do vegetables to earn a living, pay our bills, we’d have a two acre garden and buy compost. But we were looking for something more holistic. Everything's gotta be in a hurry. Whereas with horses: it’s that pace and that’s it, you can’t make them go faster. Which was a good way for us.”

Kim: “It’s also a nice cycle: the horses provide the manure to make the compost to put on our fields, and help to make their own feed for the winter."

Frank: “We wanted a place where we could make most of our hay for the horses, which has been fairly accurate. Although lately, with all the rain, we hardly get a three-day dry stretch to make hay. We might have to go and buy all of our hay.”

Kim: “I grew up with cows, but I didn’t necessarily want to have a dairy farm. With horses you can go away for three days in the winter to visit your parents. It gives us a little more flexibility.”

As they sold their first team when they left New York State; in New Hampshire they bought their second team Betsey and Belle. Belle arrived due to foal, and when Ben was born, there were three black Percherons on the farm.

Frank: “Bennie’s mom and auntie are buried by the apple trees. Bennie’s mother just died in the pasture over at the neighbors, wasn’t even here. Her heart stopped.”

Kim: “Betsey the same thing, she just died of old age, she couldn’t get up, and once horses are down, they don’t live long.” She sighs. “But she was 28, that’s plenty. Horses that size usually don’t live much longer; 30 is ancient for a draft horse.”

Molly and Moon came in as a team. Kim: “We worked with them and Ben for a while, and then, as they got older, we got Clyde a couple of years ago. We found it hard to pair them. It’s much easier to get a team that has already worked together. We did some learning.”

Frank: “We will have to get a new team before we’re done. The last time the economy went down in 2008, people were giving their horses away, we could have had ten horses. Now, they’re fiercely expensive. The pandemic has made people get horses.”

The new team will relieve Molly, who will join Moon in retirement. Frank says, “Their usefulness is up, but they’re not dead.”

Kim: “It’s not just usefulness, it’s affection.”

Frank adds, “A tractor has its good points, too – it doesn't need to rest like a horse. But neither does it have a relationship with its owner. Few people have cried when a tractor died.”

People want to see abundance

On a sunny Tuesday afternoon in July 2023, with the rumble of another nearing thunderstorm echoing in the surrounding mountains, CSA member Zach picks up his half-share and asks Frank if he can stop by soon with his four-year-old daughter Coraline, who wants to learn all about growing mushrooms. “I enjoy the quietness of this farm,” Zach says, “it’s so peaceful here.”

Kim ponders: “Growing up, my family had a farm out there by ourselves and the milk truck came every other day, but you didn’t deal with customers on any level. "I really had to get used to people coming to visit the farm twice a week. There’s also a lot of satisfaction in that. To have people come here and say: ‘Oh, my gosh, this is so good.’ or ‘Oh, my gosh, I can’t believe that’s what an eggplant looks like when it’s flowering.’”

Frank has supplemented their income in the winters working at the Brattleboro Food Coop in Vermont, stocking shelves, while Kim gets a little money for writing a monthly farm column for a local newspaper.

Frank says, “We started doing the farmers market as well seven years ago, when we had a year we were not able to sell all our CSA shares – we thought we should diversify. Now the farmers’ market is almost a quarter of our income.”

They prefer the CSA, however, because at the farmers’ market more food gets wasted. Frank: “People in this country want to see abundance …”

Kim: “ … and perfection.”

Frank: “If they don’t see that, they don’t buy anything. And we’re not willing to go to the farmers’ market and take way more than they need so that it looks abundant and beautiful.”

Kim: “You end up bringing home more and then you have to decide what to do with it, throw it on your compost pile, or feed it to your pigs, pigs which we don’t have! So we bring a smaller table, that way it looks more plentiful. We figured out ways around it. But it's much less steady, when it’s raining nobody comes to the farmers' market. With a CSA share people already paid for it so they will come and pick it up.”

They kept asking for kale, we finally gave in

Frank and Kim are clear to their supporters about what their farm can and cannot offer. They know their land and soil, and some popular types of produce don’t thrive, aren’t profitable or simply aren't a good fit. As Frank says, “Do we want to grow sweet potatoes and put acres of mulch down? Some parameters are ethical: how do we want to do it?”

Kim: “Everybody loves sweet corn, but it’s a heavy feeder, we’d have to use a lot more fertilizer around it and not grow something else. For us, it wasn’t worth it. There are other places to get organic sweet corn around here. But Frank loves everything about tomatoes: looking at the catalog, ordering, growing and eating them. We grow a lot more tomatoes than other people do. But when somebody calls up and says: ‘I have this special diet and I can’t eat nightshades’, we’ll have to say: ‘This is not the CSA farm for you. Because you’re gonna get a lot of tomatoes and potatoes and eggplant.’

“We did surveys, people wanted more greens and kale all year long and we made changes that way. We used to only have kale in the fall, when it grows better, but it got so popular in this culture ten years ago, everybody was going into kale. The CSA members kept asking for it and we finally gave in. They take it all year long and it gives us another steady green.

“You can have more variety with a CSA garden. At the farmers’ market, the people are not big buyers of purple top turnips, but they like your tomatoes, lettuce, and broccoli. Typically, I would say, people who are joining a CSA garden are a little more adventurous in their cooking and eating. They’re willing to try celery, kohlrabi, to eat seasonally. If they aren’t, they don’t come back.”