That’s not to say it’s all been smooth sailing since I got my team home on that cold weekend in April. I hauled them from Idaho, white-knuckling over the pass during the late spring cold snap that dumped snow at the coast and froze cherry blossoms in Hood River. We got home safely, but when I unloaded Barney from the trailer, he was limping. His lameness would last for three weeks, due to a bacterial infection and then an abscess in his hoof.

Meanwhile, the horses were quarantined in a dry paddock to prevent them from overdosing on the lush spring grass. They worked over every fenceline they could in an effort to break free into greener pastures. They pushed over fence posts. They trampled gates. The rain poured down and turned the paddock to mud.

And all the while I’m pushing back against the growing fear that I am crazy. That this is just too much, on top of everything else. That I have bitten off way more than I can chew and the world is waiting for me to fail. And worst of all, that maybe all my ideals about farming aren’t practical after all — like my belief that I can eventually farm without tractors; my insistence on the sensibility and necessity of moving towards a grass-fueled agriculture instead of gas-fueled agriculture; my belief that draftpower is not Luddite but beautifully futuristic.

I was sick at the thought of it all, bracing for the body-blow from reality that felt inevitable.

One day in the midst of it all — with Barney still limping and a gate newly crushed — I called up Doc Hammill, my mentor who has taught me everything about work horses. I was choking back tears. “I don’t know if I can do it, Doc.”

Doc is a wise, wise man. “You’re being tested,” he said. “All of us get tested at some point when we choose horses, and you just happen to be getting your test in the first three weeks of owning them,” he chuckled. Then he put down the phone and I heard him rustling through his bookshelf. He came back on, cleared his throat, and read me one of his favorite quotes from Scottish expeditionist W.H. Murray:

Until one is committed there is hesitancy,
the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness.

I have learned a deep respect for one of Goethe's couplets:
"Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it.
Boldness has genius and power and magic in it."

Doc’s phone sermon propped me up and rekindled something. I stopped flinching in fear of that body-blow. I marched up to the barn, looked Barney in the eye, and invited him to be well. The next day he was sound. Within the week, I had my team in harness.

Day by day, they are finding their place on the farm, we are finding our rhythm together, and little by little I am investing in the equipment I need to put them to work fully. This week they tilled up the corn patch-to-be and cultivated raspberries for me. We saved a couple gallons of diesel and I could hear the afternoon swallow-song instead of the roar of the tractor. Bliss.

There’s no doubt it’s going to be a slow build. I still need all 32 horsepower that my sister’s tractor offers up right now, but in two or three years I’m aiming for a farm that is 100% horsepowered. Crazy what can happen once you think a thought.

Read Zoë's story, Putting the Horse Back into Horsepower: Grass-Powered Agriculture, published in the Winter 2008 issue of Edible Portland.