FERRUM -- Wedge and Tong leaned into their harness. Much more experienced than their driver, the pair of Suffolk draft horses responded to his soft, insistent commands and pulled him, the homemade cart he sat on and 230 board feet of eastern white pine up the slope with short, powerful strides.

There was little more apparent effort than the horses had displayed ambling toward their feed buckets a couple of hours earlier.

"Work's in their nature," Jagger Rutledge said as he watched the rig pull away. "It's like a border collie likes to herd."

Jagger Rutledge -- his first name is the Old English term for "teamster" -- is half of the Healing Harvest Forest Foundation's logging crew. His father, Jason Rutledge, is the other half. Ian Snider, the man driving Wedge and Tong, is their apprentice. And though Snider is doing the driving, Wedge and Tong are helping in his education.

"These horses are training the young man," Jagger Rutledge said.

"This is about culture," Jason Rutledge said. "It's about anthropological culture, or the passing on of knowledge from one person to another outside of an institutional setting. It's about learning how to do things from someone else. And it's also about hands-on learning.

"Probably the most important thing is that the forest is not destroyed in the process.

Healing Harvest is based in the Floyd County community of Copper Hill. The nonprofit was established in 1999 to support sustainable forestry and animal-powered logging. They advocate a "worst-first," single-selection cutting program. That means choosing to cut individual trees, taking weak, diseased and unwanted trees first and leaving healthy trees to continue to grow.

"What's important is what's left," Jason Rutledge said.

Cutting the weakest and least desirable trees opens up the forest for other growth, he said. Not only trees, but also mushrooms and ginseng -- which Healing Harvest will help landowners cultivate -- can thrive in a healthy forest.

"You can't have them without the forest," Jason Rutledge said. "You can't grow them in a clear cut."

There is a philosophical difference between the Rutledges' approach and conventional logging that goes beyond the question of whether the operation is powered by animal or machine -- though that may be symbolic of the deeper difference.

Gene Dalton | The Roanoke Times

Apprentice Ian Snider and a team of logging horses drag a white pine log from the woods.

The logging horses

• The Rutledge operation uses Suffolks — sometimes called Suffolk Punches.
• The breed comes from England’s Suffolk and Norfolk counties, but today there are more Suffolks in the United States than in England.
• Most draft horses are descended from animals bred to carried armored knights, but Suffolks have always been meant for agricultural work.
• Always chestnut, they can stand 5 feet tall at the shoulder and can weigh a ton.

The horse loggers

The Healing Harvest Forest Foundation is a 501(c)3 established in 1999. The foundation’s mission statement says it was created “To address human needs for forest products while creating a nurturing coexistence between the forest and the human community.” (healingharvestforestfoundation.org )

Conventional logging is all about managing resources. That, Snider said, suggests an external puppeteer manipulating the forest. Snider, on the other hand, speaks of being an "ecosystem participant."

A graduate student at Appalachian State University, Snider said he draws inspiration from the Chipko movement in the Garhwal section of India.

The movement -- "chipko" translates as "embrace" -- is the origin of the term "tree hugger." By some accounts, this movement for local control of natural resources is well over 200 years old, but its most famous moments came in the 1970s. When the government gave logging rights to outside interests, people -- mostly women and children -- surrounded the trees to prevent their harvest. The point of the movement wasn't to stop logging. It was to stop logging without consideration of long-term effects and without giving local people a stake.

"They don't see themselves as separate from the natural world," Snider said. "They see themselves as part of it."

Jason Rutledge readily admits that his method of logging doesn't offer the best short-term return for the logger or the landowner. But it offers other rewards -- and it extends the return over many years.

A clear cut brings in the most money at one time, but it erases the forest for decades.

"If you owned a bank," Jason Rutledge said, "why would you rob it?"

He wants landowners to think of woodlands as a stock portfolio. Clear-cutting is liquidating. Cutting the best trees and leaving the weakest is like selling your blue chip stocks and investing in low performers. The forest is principal, he said. What you cut is interest.

The Rutledges and supporters of more conventional logging practices agree horse logging is a niche business, best suited for relatively small tracts.

But most forest in Virginia is on privately owned tracts of 50 acres or less.

Clear cuts vs. other logging practices

Gene Dalton | The Roanoke Times

The Rutledges and their horses at work.

Clear cuts, where entire mountainsides are stripped of trees, are a common practice when logging is done by heavy machinery. The practice is blamed for habitat destruction, erosion and other environmental problems, but a clear cut can be the most environmentally sensitive way to log, said Mike Aust, a professor of forestry at Virginia Tech.

Measured over 60 years, a clear cut in the mountains of Virginia will produce an average of 13 tons of erosion per acre, he said. Leaving 10 to 20 trees per acre produces 14 tons. Another logging method called group selection — essentially a series of 1-acre clear cuts inside a larger tract — produces 16 tons.

And eight tons of soil will erode from an undisturbed forest tract.

A clear cut happens once in 60 years. The other methods mean repeated returns to the forest, which means cutting new roads or reestablishing old ones on each trip. Healing Harvest’s single selection method means return trips, too. The Suffolk horses the Rutledges use can weigh a ton, which puts an awful lot of soil compacting force on each hoof.

“A horse is a large animal with four shovels attached to its feet,” Aust said.

So Aust argues that horse logging can do as much damage as mechanical logging.

But horse loggers don’t have to cut roads for 8-foot-wide skidders. The deepest ground disturbance in horse logging is generally the width of one log, Josh Deal found during his senior year at Virginia Tech.

Deal, now a forester with the national forest service, earned a degree in industrial forest operations. In the fall of 2002, Deal compared the Rutledges’ single selection horse-powered operation with a conventional logging operation that used the group selection method.

In Deal’s comparison, the horse operation caused much less disturbance to the ground. In fact, it left more than half the area undisturbed. The mechanical operation left 20 percent of the land undisturbed.