The Royal Agricultural University (RAU) has announced the return of heavy horses to its fields.
The Ardennes horses, Sol and Kipp helped teach agriculture, agroecology, and equine students at the university how horses can be used for various agricultural and countryside management tasks, including logging.
Ardennes horses are one of the oldest draft breeds in the world originating in the Ardennes area in Belgium, Luxembourg, and France.
RAU associate professor in equine research leadership, Dr. Andrew Hemmings said: “Today we have been able to show our students first-hand how horses can be used in small and larger scale farming operations and how working in this way can have enormous sustainability benefits.
“With mental health issues becoming more common in isolated farming communities, the physical and psychological health benefits of horse contact are manifold.”
The horses worked on land adjoining the university’s Cirencester campus that is part of the ‘Zero dig’ site, run by the Farming and Wildlife Advisory Group (FWAG) south-west.
The workshop was run by the horses’ owner, Kate Mobbs-Morgan who uses them to run her forestry enterprise, offering services from felling to extraction and cutting timber in south Wales.
She said: “I feel very much that horses are a viable option in current woodland and land management.”
Heavy horses were traditionally used for many jobs on the farm, including timber extraction, mowing, harrowing, and bracken bashing.
The university said using conventional agricultural machinery to do these tasks in often fragile habitats, with soils that have developed solely from natural processes, can damage the important underground networks of fungi and root systems that benefit associated ground flora.
RAU senior lecturer in sustainable land management, Dr. Jonathan Code, said: “We believe that multiple small-scale farming operations could be the way forward and, instead of looking towards alternative ways of fuelling machines, let’s reconnect with the power of horses in these farming operations.
“As creatures, horses and humans have enjoyed a mutually beneficial relationship that has developed over the last 6,000 years, but which has lapsed significantly over the past century.”
