At Last Farm and Studios

12/18/2024

12/13/2024

Gallop on Rodney Jenkins. A remarkable horseman and a true icon!

12/11/2024

Retirement of the great Snowman at the 1969 National

🥰 ❣ 💓 ❥ 💑 💜🥰 ❣ 💓 ❥ 💑 💜

Snowman (February 29, 1948 – September 24, 1974)[citation needed] was a former plow horse of mixed breed ancestry, possibly a cross of a grade horse with a US Army Remount stallion.[citation needed] He was purchased for $80 on his way to a slaughterhouse and became a champion in show jumping in the United States during the 1950s. During his career he was known as "The Cinderella Horse" due to his "rags to riches" story.

12/10/2024

12/10/2024

Sally Swift's "journey" to becoming a riding teacher who has probably helped more actual people than the most famous Olympian didn't really start rolling until she was in her sixties.

Sally had scoliosis, so her own riding was limited, but probably, just as they say blind people have a heightened sense of hearing as a compensatory mechanism, Sally had an uncanny sense of what body part was the root cause of something else. Fix the root, start to fix the bigger problem. An example might be that rigid shoulders prevented a swinging back, that sort of thing.

At first, I don't think Sally's insights were accepted or even "welcomed" by the "dressage community."

After all, they said, she isn't a rider. She has worked for decades for a Holstein cow association. In Brattleboro, Vermont. She is old. What does she know?

But Sally could see, and therefor fix, posture and mechanical and emotional issues that flew past the radar screens of the more famous "experts."

Her book, Centered Riding, is probably the biggest selling non fiction horse book of all time, and every day riders use Sally's techniques to loosen up and balance and be more one with the horses they ride.

And Sally was totally and completely non judgmental. She tried just as hard with someone most trainers would write off as she would with some current riding icon.

A famous rider is only famous for about as long as he/she is riding and competing, and after a few years of retirement, is vanished and forgotten. But Sally Swift who died in 2009 at 95, will be remembered today, as riders all over the world quote her and use her teachings.

12/09/2024

Snow rollers in the USA were probably being phased out about 100 years ago, except in the more rural pockets. Their purpose was to pack down the snow on roads to make it easier for sleighs to travel, and even after the early cars and trucks came into use, many of them were stored for the winter in favor of horse drawn sleighs and pungs, which were basically work sleds.

When the road crews came to a covered bridge they had to hand shovel snow from outside onto the wooden roadway, a process that my father remembered being called “snowing the bridge.”

Obviously cars and sleighs couldn’t easily coexist, so at some point snow rollers went out of business, as did the sleighs. I have never seen a snow roller in full gear, just the roller part abandoned to rot away in a pasture in South Royalton, Vermont decades ago.

This photo is from "Vermont's Northland Journal."

12/09/2024

12/09/2024

12/09/2024

Merry Christmas 🎄 Freedom Farm !