Woodland News & Notes

Horsepower on center stage
in Riveredge demonstration 
    Black Gold and Monique were the stars of the show Saturday as a light snow fell at the Riveredge Nature Center just north of Newburg.  The two Percherons worked together as well as any team I’ve seen on the ice in the Olympics in the last few days, and what they accomplished was just as artistic, even if they didn’t “medal.”  
    You could argue that John Adametz, their owner, was the real star, but none of that really matters much.  What matters is how well they demonstrated the advantages of having a low impact logging operation in a woodland.
     The two-horse team and their owner hail from A-Z Percherons in Highland – a town about 60 miles west of Madison or 20 miles northwest of Dodgeville.  They were part of the program at Riveredge to demonstrate small-scale methods for harvesting logs while dealing with the threat and devastation of the emerald ash borer.  About 30% of the trees at the 380 acres that make up the nature center are ash, so the invasive beetle is a big worry, and several people explained the efforts being made to deal with the problem. 

    For his part of the demonstration, Adametz put his two prize horses through their paces with the “gee” and “haw” commands – right and left – and more. They responded perfectly to “back a step,” “giddyup” and “whoa,” literally stopping on a dime when they needed to.  They understand about 12 commands, Adametz said.

   Explaining how the horses were trained, he said he didn’t even begin the process until they were 2 years old and didn’t use them for actual logging work until they were 5 years old, because it takes that long for them to become physically developed enough for the work.  He has about 30 horses, but only four are used for logging.  

   As to the advantages of low-impact logging, Adametz said:

    “We don’t run over any trees.  We don’t make any roads.”  He said one customer was pleased with the work and thought that a road had been created during a winter harvest, but in the spring he couldn’t tell where the horses had been. 

     He said he can go into a woods in the winter and pull a log up a snowy trail in the afternoon and it will freeze up overnight to make a solid skid run “that’ll be harder than your ex-mother-in-law’s heart” by the next morning.

     Adametz is obviously a man of many talents, as you can see from his website, and of many words as well.
    Later in the afternoon he had his wife handle the team as they pulled an ash log up to a Woodmizer Portable Sawmill that was also being demonstrated.
    “That’s the wife,” he said.  “I get the last word in every argument – ‘Yes, dear.’ ”
                                                                                       --Posted 2/20/2010