Art of Working Horses

Lynn Miller is a painter, farmer, horseman, writer and family man. Born 2/13/47, BFA San Francisco Art Institute 1970, MFA University of Oregon 1972. For over 40 years Lynn Miller has worked on alternative farming issues and is regarded as a leading authority on animal-powered agriculture. Following a career managing goat, poultry, sheep and cattle operations, in 1974 he managed Esta Valley Farms, a purebred Angus ranch, for the Chairman of the International Trade Commission. Farming and ranching his own operations organically in Oregon since 1975, he was politically active in farm and land use arenas being named to several county and state wide advisory boards including the Lane County Small Farm Task Force and Oregon Governor's Appropriate Technology Task Force. His farming practices have embraced appropriate and antiquated technologies and methods from animal-powered systems to two-cylinder tractors, from blacksmithing to crop rotation systems. He has viewed all aspects of his farming adventure as existential seed-saving. In 1976 he founded the Small Farmer's Journal, an international agrarian quarterly. For its entire 40 year history he functioned as editor/publisher. As editor he authored and published over four hundred of his technical articles and essays in SFJ. In 1980 he authored the best-selling Work Horse Handbook. Subsequently he wrote and published 15 volumes. He has had many articles and essays, by and about him, published in collections, newspapers and magazines including Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Ranch & Reata and Western Horseman. He was included in Yale University Press's Rooted in the Land. In 1979 he was named by Rural America as one of the forty leaders of alternative farming in North America and attended a private meeting of the group at Winrock International, Little Rock, Arkansas, to redefine "Small Farms" for the US congress. He has lectured across North America as keynote for many farm conferences as well as lecturer on three occasions at Cornell University, at Amherst, at the California Farm Conference, the Canadian Farm Conference, Washington State Tilth Conference, New Mexico Organic Farming Conference, Maine Common Ground Fair (three occasions), and on three occasions keynote at the EcoFarm Conference in Asilomar, California, at which, in 1999, he was awarded the Stewart of Sustainable Agriculture Award. He has been awarded many additional accolades and distinctions, including the Utne Reader award for environmental excellence, The Garfield Center award for the Preservation of Agricultural Technologies, and an Award for distinguished service from the Missouri house of Representatives. For thirty years he has conducted workshops and demonstrations on animal-power and horse training all across the US and Canada.