I Didn’t Learn Anything at Horse Progress Days
A Brief Reminder to Look Both Ways
by Taylor Reed
Out of respect for you, reader, I’ll be up-front. I didn’t learn anything at Horse Progress Days because I didn’t attend Horse Progress Days. Let me lay out a case for why the event still deserves your consideration.
Months ago, someone offered a hot tip. A gathering was brewing — rural Central Michigan, early July, and a special one — “Horse Progress Days”. The name didn’t mean anything to me, but the recommender’s description sounded peculiar, so I scanned the internet for the lowdown.
The annual gathering is held at a different Midwestern site each year. Last year was its thirtieth anniversary, and last week, it was held in Clare, Michigan, pulling in an estimated 13,000–15,000 attendees. In 2024, it was in Gordonville, Pennsylvania. 2023 — Shipshewana, Indiana. Those names might not mean anything to you, but there is a theme: those spots are Amish strongholds, which makes sense. Horse Progress Days is a massive gathering and trade show geared towards innovations in horse-powered farming and small-scale livelihood, largely outside the realm of fossil fuels.
This means draft horses. It means handwork and pedal-powered contraptions. It means taking cues from international guests who share their own wisdom.
I imagine it now: morning mist dissipates, the ground underfoot shakes, a shire-horse stamps. I pick up on granules of oilstone grit scraping over steel — last-minute touches before a scything demonstration. And soon after, I feel my face reddening as the delicate nuances of so-called “simple” machines whiz right over my non-engineering head.
Humbled as I might have been, I did have every intention of making it, $15 entry fee and all. Clare is twenty-something minutes from where my parents live, and I didn’t know when or if it’d be hosted in Michigan again. In the end, though, it just wasn’t meant to be. On the 4th and the 5th of July, I was right here in Northwest Michigan.
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If you look into the particulars of Horse Progress Days, you’ll see heavy, heavy Amish representation, but that Anabaptist image might be stretched a bit. You’ll read about small-scale Amish metal-fabricators, out-of-the-way operations specializing in achieving parameters long abandoned by larger industrial ag-manufacturers. You might also see photos of showcases from similarly nimble shops visiting from across the Atlantic — Scandinavian micro-businesses that never fell under the sway of large-scale equipment despite longstanding commitment to innovation and experimentation. Or maybe you’ll catch a snippet of an offering shared by a visitor from some sub-Saharan enclave, wherein the Green revolution never totally wrested control from traditional foodways.
You see, the whole gathering rests on pushback to a trend. Somewhere along the timeline of industrialization, farming equipment didn’t appear to require as much attunement to the landscape. The tractor and other forms of agricultural machinery grew larger and more powerful, transcending limits thanks to the incredible energy bound within fossil fuels.
Nimbleness and efficiency were no longer primary metrics of quality. Why prioritize those constraints when diesel offers more oomph than one might ever need?
And engineering for accessible maintenance? That’s less of a concern when profits and equipment sales are the end goal rather than equipping communities with tools they can repair and fine-tune themselves.
Here’s the rub, and it’s a long one, so bear with me. When fossil fuel availability becomes a concern, or the effects of widespread combustion start to skew natural patterns that all things rely upon, or inequality and concentration of wealth and power drive localized livelihoods further and further out of reach, the slicked-ease that fossil fuel-dominated agriculture represented begins to seize. That’s when more people hunger for alternatives.
Those alternatives are not fully fleshed-out systems from the past or wholly unproven future technologies. There are spaces where those two, looking back in time and looking forward, meet. Again, I wasn’t there at the event. If I was there, I’m sure I would have learned, and one of my areas of learning would likely be where and how exactly my idyllic imagining of the event smacks against reality. Still, the premise of Horse Progress Days strikes me as one of those alternative spaces.
It seems like a pocket that fundamentally depends on what’s been reliable in the past, meaning good design, craftsmanship, appropriate scale, and closed-loop systems. But it isn’t limited to stagnant traditionalism. It’s also about bearing witness to new visions of what might be possible — innovation, adoption, and inspiration.
Despite the attendance numbers, the event represents an undercurrent. I only knew of it because of word of mouth. So much of the passage of these third-way orientations relies upon being with people, face-to-face. I want to encounter those committed to settings steeped in tradition who also push for new applications. And I want to encounter those immersed in swirling worlds of new visions who find grounding in what’s been steadfast over time immemorial. Maybe I’ll catch you at a gathering like Horse Progress Days in the future. Maybe we already spoke at one in the past. Either way, I’ll keep an eye out, looking both ways.
Note: Many thanks to Tom Hurst for aiming to bring me into the HPD-fold. Tom has attended many times as a representative of Tillers International, an organization here in Michigan that carries a lot of clout in draft-horse and sustainable agriculture circles.
