Day: July 5, 2016

Flo has appropriated the wicker table we put out for the Open House. She is the Queen, she goes where she wants, takes what she needs, kills what she can.

It has been a difficult and challenging time for Farrier Ken Norman and his wife Eli, and for their farm in Vermont.

A year and a half ago,  Norman had a double knee replacement, and he was out of work for three months.

Soon after that, his wife Eli broke her wrist and has been unable to do farm work or offer her horse riding and training lessons.

A couple of weeks ago, the transmission on Ken”s shoeing/farm truck broke down, he needs thousands of dollars to replace it. He also needs about $1,500 worth of hay to feed his 33 horses – many of them rescues – for the upcoming winter.

Many of you helped Ken get through the knee replacement surgery, I have urged him to ask for  help again.

He needs $8,000 to get his truck fixed and buy the hay he needs for the rugged Vermont winters. Ken is not one of those people who likes to ask for help – he hates it, in fact.  But he agrees that he needs some more help.

He has launched a gofundme project to help raise some money.

Ken is a very good and much loved man. I have known him for 15 years, he has seen me through all of my ups and downs.

He is a friend to many farmers in  trouble, and to many horses in trouble.  He rushes out in the day or night to help sick, stricken and abused animals. He is the king of grunt and grumble, a man of big heart and few words, a loving husband and father.

He is a much respected farrier, he helped save my donkey Simon’s life when he was found starved and neglected on a remote farm. Animals love him and respond to  him.

He is a member of his local volunteer firefighting community.

In a sense, this is not a different issue from the first gofundme, but a continuation of it.

Ken needs some breathing room to stabilize his farm and life and work, he is recovering as well from the double knee replacements. This process has not been simple or quick. Eli’s injury – she broke her wrist and has required multiple new casts and surgeries – has cost them income they depend on, and put pressure on Ken.

I have learned in recent years that many parts of the animal world – people like Ken, dog and cat lovers, farmers with livestock, people who work with animals and love them – have formed a a new kind of community.

We share a love of animals and a common desire to keep them among us.

We rush to help one another, to stand with one another when there is trouble. I saw this with Ken, with Joshua Rockwood, with many others, this blog has helped to raise more than $130,000 for animal people and good people in need.

Ken needs some help to get on his feet and  stay there. I hope you can help. The wonderful thing about crowdsourcing is that there are a lot of us, if we all give a little, we can get where we need to go. We raised more than $70,000 for Joshua Rockwood, $45,000 for Scott and Lisa Carrino’s fund to buy their cafe building.

Fortunately, Ken doesn’t need that much. But what he does need is urgent and very real. You can find out more about it here.

There are few farriers left in the country, Vermont or elsewhere, their costs are always rising, especially since the recession, but there is only so much they can charge. They have to drive long distances in all kinds of weather and work long and brutal hours tending to horses and donkeys. Horses and donkeys desperately need for them to survive and keep their way of life.

Ken is a legend around here for helping people in need.  When Simon collapsed in the pasture, Ken was the first person I called, he answered me from his hospital bed, his wife Eli showed up minutes later. Many farmers reached deep into their pockets to help him the first time and so did many of you. I hope you are able to do it again and thanks for considering it.

Ed Gulley left some of his wooden flowers after the Open House, we put them in the woodshed to protect them, but it was fun to see them there. Maybe there ought to be wooden flowers in the woodshed.

We finished skirting the wool Sunday afternoon, we got eleven bags, some beautiful wool which we will take this weekend to Vermont and leave at the mill there. It will come back to Maria as yarn and roving. We let the wool grow longer this year before shearing, and as the sheep mature, so does their wool. Some rich colors.

We picked dirt and grime and feces off of the wool and put it into marked plastic bags. We’ll go to the mill this weekend. This was a quiet and pleasant weekend, I experimented with my new infrared camera. We never relax quite as much as we hope to, but the weekend did enable to fully recover from the Open House.  We saw friends Saturday night and Sunday afternoon, otherwise kept to ourselves.Time to start planning for October.