Oral History Feature | Jacob Crigler & Kara Dodson
Jacob Crigler & Kara Dodson are first generation organic produce farmers. They are outliers in the farming community because of their youth and they carry on the timeless tradition of farming with draft horses. They sat down with BRAHM Programs & Outreach Director, Willard Watson III for "The Way Watauga Works" to share some memorable times from their experience farming.
KD – Remember that time we almost got hurt? Yeah, we were logging with the horses and they were pulling hard, I was not able to totally control their speed and we stopped, we pulled the logs everyone was fine, we stopped, my nerves were a little shot, and we were like, well let’s just do one more job with them, and we hooked them up to the homesteader, it’s a cultivating tool, it’s two horses and a little cart behind it if you can imagine that. So we hook up the horses, and I’m holding the lines before I get on there, and Jacob’s hooking the front neck yoke, and they were bothered by the bugs, that was the big thing, the horse flies were biting them, and they were getting really antsy, and one of the horses threw a fit and she got one of her legs stuck on the other side of the metal bar called that’s called the tongue.
JC – That’s in between the two horses.
KD – So the horses are on either side of this metal bar and she got her leg over it, so that means she was straddling it and she started rearing and bucking and falling on the ground, and the only thing I could do was hold the lines and I told Jacob to get out of the way and she did that for two minutes, it felt like 30 minutes and she finally stood for long enough that we unhooked them, and it was really scary and it was like after that, we put the horses up, we tried to keep our cool and then we had a talk about like, ”Alright, do we get rid of the horses? Did that scare us enough that we can’t do this anymore?” And we kept the horses and we keep working with them and they’re good and it’s like you can’t let one really scary near death experience totally scare you out of doing this.
It was really good of us to have that conversation of totally honest, that scared the life out of me. If that had gone wrong, Jacob would’ve had a broken arm, I would’ve had a broken leg, the horse would’ve had a broken leg and we would have had to put it down. That is just like real talk, and I think it brings kind of what we do into a really big moment, we still want to do this work with horses, and just because it was scary we will remember that forever. And it was a good point in our first year, just how serious are we and what human error did we have in the whole thing, it wasn’t just them it was a lot of us."
Photo by Ashley Warren @naturalcraftphotography
@fullmoonfarmnc
Read their full interview at:
blowingrockmuseum.org/see/wataugaworks