Tuesday 17 April 2012

Return to the "past"


This story is from South Africa

Farmer bucks upward spiral in petrol price
A CABBAGE-farming preacher has bucked high petrol prices by turning to horse power to plough his land.


26 April, 2012

Although he has seemingly moved the hands of time back to an era when life was a lot slower, Grahamstown’s Shawn Warren insists he still manages to get the work done as quickly as a tractor – but at a fraction of the price.

You are working in nature, there is no pollution and the horse residue (manure) helps to fertilise the cabbages,” the 42-year-old quipped.

It is also a very therapeutic stress reliever that keeps me fit and healthy at the same time.”

A jack-of-all-trades, Warren lives on a smallholding next door to Waainek Prison on the outskirts of the City of Saints with his wife, Gerrie, three kids and 52 horses.

The farming preacher decided to train two cart horses to work the land after being shocked at how much locals charged for a tractor and driver to do the same work.

I borrowed a tractor to break the ground when I first started planting cabbages and quickly realised the cost of petrol and wear-and-tear was phenomenal,” he recalled.

And to make matters worse, the specially hired tractor soon got bogged down in the muddy field for hours on end – before he was saddled with a hefty hire bill.

That is when I decided six months ago to use horses to plough and harvest.”
Rotating the grunt work between eager cart horses Tiny and Crystal, a bonus of growing cabbages is that the steeds also enjoy the fruits of their labour.

I make much more profit using horses. They eat some of the cabbages when I harvest, keeping my feed costs down to about R100 each a month.”

Guiding the plough in a straight line behind Tiny, Warren says his quarterly efforts to turn the soil for planting 50 000 cabbage seedlings at a time has become more than just a family affair.

Friends and neighbours regularly pitch and get down and dirty in the veld.

It is like stepping back in time. Everybody loves working with horses in the soil in the old way. We are never short of people wanting to help.”

His 16-year-old daughter Kayla walks the horse in a straight line, while his 14-year-old son Keenan follows with a spade to dig the wet soil off the plough when it clogs up

Keenan and his younger brother Kelvin, 14, also share time behind the plough – instead of sitting around watching TV.

I threw the TV away a few years ago,” Warren explains.

Besides being a Pentecostal Protestant minister who runs a weekend tent ministry for 50 people on his farm, Warren shoes horses, grows and sells cabbages and works as a wild horse wrangler.

Many of Warren’s 52 steeds were caught in the wild in the Amathola mountains and trained to be ridden as part of his equine outreach programme.

Instead of shooting wild horses for dog food, many farmers now call the Grahamstown horse whisperer to capture and remove them.

A modern-day cowboy, Warren and a friend are counting the days until they leave for an epic cross- country horse ride to the Northern Cape at the end of the month.


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