Because Josh has been helping Daryl with his hay, Daryl has let Josh use his big draft horses and his mowers to mow his fields and stack his hay this year in Montpelier. According to Josh, when you hook the draft horses up to the horse-drawn mower, the wheels start turning which makes the knife move to cut the grass. One horse with a mower can cut an acre and a half in an hour and can run for five hours before needing to rest for the remainder of the day.

According to Daryl Woolstenhulme, he has been mowing and raking with draft horses like this for 17 to 18 years now, and it works. Sometimes he will hire someone to come in and do the bailing, but everything else he does himself with his family.

He has been collecting the mowers for 30 years. He rebuilds them from someone’s junk pile.

He has also been breeding the draft horses for years. They are mainly North American spotted drafts.

He says that mowing this way is slow, but it is cost effective, because it costs so much to farm these days. It takes a whole crew to put up that much hay. He usually works the horses for five to six hours at the most. A lot of them are nursing mothers as well. “So,” according to Daryl, “they can earn their feed.”

He also told us that several other people still mow this way on account of the efficiency. There is a man in Lyman, Wyo., who does it. There are also a few here and there who incorporate it as much as they can, and a few who just play at it. Daryl says they used to do a lot more than they do now because they are slowing down. One of the problems is that they are all dry farms. Their hay is all ready at the same time and they have just a two-week window to “make it happen.” It is all time sensitive. If they had irrigated ground and had two or three crops with a longer time period, they could do it a lot easier.

The Amish still do some of this type of mowing, except they bale their hay. Daryl and Josh are putting their hay up “loose,” like in the thirties and forties. There is a bull rake that goes out and scoops it up, and then it is taken into a stacker that’s called an overshot. It is shot out of the overshot into a loose stack. Someone is on top of the stack and spreads it out.

Daryl has been handling the draft horses since even before he moved into the Bear Lake Valley; 30 to 40 years. He says it’s a passion he has had most of his life. He says in reality he is just a kid off the farm, and the farm is really why he does it. His horses have to earn their keep by putting up their own hay and raising colts.

His dad never had draft horses. He just saw people handling them and thought it was the neatest thing in the world. So, he read every book he could find on them and talked to the “old timers” who were still doing it. Then he got into it himself.

Daryl is proud to have his grandkids and his daughter on the farm helping him out. They can do just about anything he needs to have help with; they can mow hay, help with the horses, or whatever he needs. They all just love the farm life.