Maybe it’s a little youthful rebellion or maybe it’s the reporter in the barn distracting her, but Onyx, a five-year-old black and white mare, is having trouble staying put for trainer Justin Battista as he gets her equipped with a harness on Tuesday afternoon.

Battista has been training Onyx and Amber, a five-year-old brown mare, to perform light farm work at Sunnyfield Farm in Peterborough since June.

On the farm, workhorses have long since been replaced by the tractor, but farm managers Dan and Ruth Holmes would like to see that change at Sunnyfield.

“It’s mostly environmental. We think there’s still a place for the horse on a farm,” Ruth Holmes said Wednesday.

Every Tuesday afternoon Battista and Dan Holmes harness the horses and take them out to a field to train walking and pulling as a team.

“They haven’t been doing farm work yet,” Holmes said. “They’re starting to pull things and they are doing just fine. ... Sometimes you’ll get that teenager stuff from them, but overall they doing really well.”

The horses enjoy the training, Holmes said. “They get geared up when they go out there. ... Now they’ve gotten the concept of pulling.”

Holmes said she expects the horses will begin working this summer hauling water buckets, chicken coops, and firewood. These jobs are too delicate for the tractor, Ruth said.
“Sometimes we can’t get into the garden because it’s too wet for a tractor.”

The farm uses firewood from the woods out back, but because the Holmeses don’t want to clear a road for the tractor in the woods, farmhands carry the wood out.

“We’re always bringing out our own wood and you can’t get a tractor in there without clearing trees for a road. We want to be a little more environmentally sensitive and not create a big old road.”

While Onyx and Amber will not replace the farm’s tractor, they may be useful stand-ins when the tractor breaks down or gets stuck in the mud, Holmes said. It very often breaks down, she said. The horses also don’t require diesel fuel to run. “My husband calls them hay burners. ... So they do burn some energy but it’s not the polluting kind of energy.”

Onyx and Amber were six-months-old foals when they came to Sunnyfield.

“They were wild as all get out when they first came,” Holmes said.

They were PMU rescue horses, she said. Their mothers were used for the production of female hormones that scientist took from pregnant mare urine. When long-term use of the hormones was found to be unsafe thousands of horses were put on the market all at one and rescue groups worked to save the horses from being sold for meat, Holmes said.

A horse lover Ruth had always wanted horses on the farm but needed to justify it to Dan. The couple has been farming since they were married 30 years ago. They have been managing Sunnyfield for the past seven years.

“He’s more of a cow man,” Ruth said of Dan. “I convinced my husband if we got them I could train them to work.”

Before the mares were old enough to train for work they were trained how to be around people, she said. “Just getting them used to cars and people and noise and just things going on.”

Holmes and Battista have been riding the horses since July. The farm has a third horse, Dakota, who is strictly for riding. “My intention was always to have a riding horse too because I enjoy riding,” said Ruth Holmes.

The pipe dream is to use Onyx and Amber to cart a wagon to town for the farmers market or make an egg delivery run, she said. “We also want to do hayrides in a small way. We think that would be a big draw.”

The mares aren’t ready to pull a wagon full of people yet, though, Holmes said, so maybe next year.

This story appears on Page 1 of the March 4 Ledger-Transcript.