Currently I began cutting a 47 acre tract of hardwood in North Central Ohio. So far, I have felled around 12,000 bd ft when our weather suddenly changed from winter to spring. I needed to get the logs out without tearing things up too badly, as the owner is ready to sell this piece of property. Faced with these circumstances I decided to contact some Amish folks to skid the logs out with horses. At7:00 AM Thursday morning they arrived after hiring a driver with a large livestock trailer which was loaded with 5 Belgian draft horses, harness, hay, and oats, and an ingenious skidding cart. One team was used to skid the logs out onto the trails, where the second team, which consisted of 3 horses abreast pulled the cart to the logs. The cart had a set of tongs and chains that rode on an angled piece of square tubing that sloped to the front. When the cart was stopped, the tongs would slide forward close to the ground to hook on to a log. As the driver would call giddup the tong would slide to the top of the angled square tubing lifting the front of the log off the ground making it easy to skid. The three horse team had no trouble at all skidding 32" diameter Poplar, Maple, and Cherry logs that I had bucked into 26' lengths. At the end of the day they had about 6000 bf skidded to the landing. It was awesome to be working without all of the noise associated with heavy machinery. I really would have liked to take some pictures to post; however, I had to respect their request not to take photos as it is against the Amish religion to have images of them taken. It sure turned out to be a beautiful and peaceful day of logging in the woods of North Central Ohio.
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