Cat Coyote’ Persherons help Ron Agnew create healthy wood lots

By Lynn Ascrizzi
Staff Writer

On a mild winter day, Ron “Cat Coyote” strolled down a woods trail through a dense, 40-acre wood lot growing behind the Yeaton Farm Inn in Belgrade.

This fall, he had been hired by bed-and-breakfast owner, Connie Parker, to clean up decades of neglect and get her wood lot into good working order.

“This farm is an overgrown garden,” he said, as he surveyed the mixed woods thickly populated with birch, fast-growing poplar, maple, ash, fir, pine and hemlock.

With his slouch hat, long gray hair tied back in a busy pony tail and drooping mustache, Agnew, 61, looks like the quintessential backwoodsman. Add to that a worn sweater, wide suspenders and work pants, scruffed-up leather boots and dirt-stained gloves stuffed in a back pocket, and you’ve got the real deal.

He got his nickname, he said, because he used to run coyote hounds for whitetail-deer management in Maine, and people called him “Coyote Ron.” Later, when he moved to the Belgrade area, people started calling him “Cat.”

“It started as a joke. Because of the hat I wear, people called me “Cat in the Hat,” he said.

He calls his business Woodland Cultivation & Creations. Besides the woods work, he handcrafts Windsor chairs and wood products, such as woven birch-bark baskets and birch and copper frames. He signs all his work, “Cat Coyote,” he said.

But Agnew, who shares his 10 acres in Rome with three draft horses and coyote hounds, is not your, backwoods Mainer, although he’s rather live in the 19th century, he said. The wood lot managment side of his business offers a time-tested form of silvaculture, nowadays called low-impact forestry.

His approach to thinning out and harvesting trees with a team of draft horses is quite the opposite of wood harvesters who cut the best and leave the rest and who haul logs with heavy machinery that can gash nearby trees and leave unsightly ruts on the forest soil.

“The ‘hosses’ feet act as a natural scarifier,” he siad. “Their hooves touch the top surface and aerate the soil. I take down the cull trees and open the area to sunlight. I don’t look for the best trees and rush to cut them… Like breeds like. I encourage the growth of healthy trees. I don’t take out healthy logs and leave the garbage.”

He does not like to pile up big brush piles in the woods.

“I lay up brosh no higher than a foot off the ground. That way, I’ve created a sun-shield. That’s good for the trees that are left. I’ve created a seed bed — just like in a garden,” he said.

His Percherons

Agnew’s two Percherons were bedded down in Parker’s 165-year-old barn set behind the inn. As soon as the mares heard his footsteps and voice, they began to stir and stamp their feet.

“I think Persherons have a little more fire than Belgians,” he siad, when asked to compare the two breeds of draft horses. His biggest mare, Reva, weights one ton; Angie is 1,800 pounds, he said.

Tucked close to Angie that morning was her 6-month-old colt, Punk. Angie had been bred and was pregnant. Punk was there to learn woods work from his momma.

“He feeds off her emotions,” he said, as he nestled the colt’s big head in the crook of his arm. “Everything is trust.”

To “twitch” out logs, he uses a homemade, two-horse winch cart, parked that morning in front of the barn. He pointed out its red, pole yok, long, ironwood (hornbeam) pole andthe recycled ship winch attached to an old mower conditioner.

“The ground is too wet to work the woods today. I’m praying for a freeze. Until it freezes, I’ll have to stay on high ground,” he said.

Agnew takes his pay in the trees he cuts, which he sells as pulpwood, boltwood and firewood, including any firewood he sells to Parker. His seemingly old-fashioned method is careful and slow-going. He estimates it will take three years of steady work to get Parker’s wood lot back into self-sufficient shape.

“I need to clear $100 per day… I live extremely low maintenance,” he siad.

For Parker, the price is right.

“It doesn’t cost me a penny to improve the property,” she said as she sat in the kitchen by the 1826 original brick fireplace, whose fire emanated warmth and the sweet smell of burning logs. Besides firewood, a healthy wood lot will raise the commercial value of her property, create beautiful nature trails for guests to wander and enhance wildlife management.

With a healthy wood lot, “she can harvest one cord, per acre, per year of new growth, or 40 cords of wood every year, consistently, without going into her inventory — forever,” Agnew said. Parker needs 20 cords per year to feed the inn’s five working fireplaces, two wood stoves and a wood furnace.

For her, Agnew’s work also has an intrinsic value.

“My guests want to see horses here. He (Agnew) is here, and I’m thrilled. I want to go back to the old community that used to exist here, where neighbors and guests talk at the table. I want to create an honest, safe community,” she said.

Six years ago, Parker, 54, left a 25-year career as a graphic and Web site designer in both Burbank, Calif. and New York City and bought the 11-room, former stage-coach stop with her mother, also named Connie Parker, who lives in Ho-ho-kus, N.J. The mother-daughter team furnished the proudly built house with country antiques, original paintings and “comfortable historic beds,” according to the inn’s Web site: (www.yeatonfarminn.com).

“The woods were so overgrown here, we didn’t even see the barn.... It’s real life here, a rather large change,” Parker said.

Woods Work

Outside, Agnew pointed out old stone walls that delineated overgrown areas near the barn.

“This was all pasture once,” he siad. Amid a mix of tree growth was a thickly planted 16-acre stand of red pine. Planted by the former owners around the 1970s, the stand had not been maintained. Many pines were dead or dying.

“The trees are girdled by porcupines, are insect-infested, choked out and unbreathable — oxygen starved. It’s a sick wood lot... The area (once) had some of the most beautiful white pines you could ask for. They’re worth three times the money red pine is,” he said, shaking his head.

“It’s a poor system for a farm wood lot,” he said, of the plantation-style planting. Nobody ahs the means or manpower it takes to maintain this red pine.”

He plans to bring the red pine grove back to white pine and plant “feed strips” of a clover mixture to encourage wildlife and walking.

Already. a number of white pine seedlings were growing around hte periphery of the red-pine stand, as if attempting to reclaim their rightful place in the order of things.

“The best farmer is the one who imitates nature the closest. If you are aware of the soil, it will tell you what you should grow there.”

Agnew gets singular pleasure from his woods-farming lifestyle.

“It’s hard work. Sometimes at the end of the day, I’m so exhausted after I feed the ‘hosses’, I lay down on the hay and listen to them eat. I could sleep there all night, and they’d never step on me,” he said.

Agnew was raised on a farm in Pelham, N.H.

Learning from Others

“I’ve been with work hosses as a child. I never went to school past the eighth grade. I always had the ability to seek out people who want to teach me,” he said.

He lived in the Rome area doing construction work until 1978, when he left for Martha’s Vineyard to work at land management and restore old farms for wealthy landowners. He began working with draft horses at the Vineyard.

In 1984, he moved to Exeter, Maine. He ran a shingle mill and he and his former wife raised their three children there. Later, he moved to Rome.

He is not one to talk about retirement plans, despite his years and the rigors of his occupation.

“It’s dangerous work,” he said. “A log can roll and take your feet out from under you. I’m slowing down, which keeps you safer.”

The payoff?

“There isn’t a better place to be in the world than to be in the woods when it’s quiet. It’s the closest place to peace I know,” he said.

For more information about Woodland Cultivation & Creations call: 207-458-2779.