An Ox in the Woods

  This article appears in the Spring 2026 issue

On a wet morning last November, a handful of people climbed a slope along the Goodwin Trail in the town of East Haddam with the intention of delivering a handmade bench inland for weary hikers. Only this was not your ordinary passage; it was a debut for Red, the young ox-in-training, to demonstrate his growing prowess as a useful—and environmentally friendly—tool for stewardship tasks. His handler was thrilled. She’s on a mission to not only keep training her growing steer (at eight months old he was nearly 600 pounds), but to re-enlist this animal and help others understand its important historical role in New England.

Nancy Kalal grew up on a dairy farm in East Lyme, Connecticut, as did her father and grandfather. The latter, I’m told, stole a horse from the Prussian army, traveling across Europe before escaping to Canada, then the US in the late 1800s. She has her grandfather’s pluck, insisting that oxen are not pets; they both need and want a job. She’s been handling them for over 20 years, and believes that they still can have a role working the land.

Technically, an ox is a steer that has been castrated, trained for farm work, and attained a full set of teeth, usually around four or five years old. To become an ox is a term of endearment given by the handler when that person believes the animal is ready to perform the work expected. Like any relationship between working handlers and their animals, the effort takes time, patience, and good genes.

Red, age 4, is learning to become a working draft animal under the care and direction of Nancy Kalal, a third-generation farmer in East Lyme, CT.

It was oxen, not horses, that opened up the New England landscape to accommodate settlements. They were brought here by the British and Dutch in the early 1600s. Oxen have broad chests, heavy bones, few illnesses, and, importantly, they are not flight animals. An ox is trained to stand still for hours and is capable of lasting all day without water. Their cloven hooves maintain stability on uneven terrain, leading to one description of a team of oxen as “an 8-wheel drive, articulated traction” tool.

Matched to the forested New England landscape, a team of oxen could pull stumps, drag logs, haul rocks, and yank a plow. In coastal areas, they were useful to transport seaweed and help with the salt hay harvest (before land was cleared for hay fields) and move fish and goods from moored boats. They were used in launching ships and pulling boats along narrow rivers. Wet and rutted roads that were too difficult for horses to negotiate were possible for oxen teams.

In addition to their working capacity, the ox also provided manure for fuel and fertilizer, and ultimately dried meat, hides, and fat for cooking tallow, soap, candles, and moisturizer. When possible, a homestead would have three pairs of oxen: young in training, mid-aged in their prime, and older oxen still capable of light work but ultimately for what could be rendered from them. Their life span is between 15 to 25 years.

As the nation expanded westward from New England, oxen continued to be instrumental. Possessing four stomachs, they can exist on available browse, giving them an advantage over horses that require higher quality fodder, including grain. Mules were more expensive, and horses were coveted and stolen by the indigenous people whose land the settlers were traveling through.

In the mid-19th century, there is said to have been over 500,000 oxen teams in North America. But by the early 20th century, better roads and more efficient machines raised the expectation for faster transportation, and oxen numbers decreased dramatically.

But that is not the end of the story. In the effort to facilitate environmentally compatible land stewardship, Kalal sees a viable role for oxen. Their cloven feet are an amenable alternative to mechanical (and potentially polluting) equipment. And Red can move pretty seamlessly up and down the trail, sporting his custom-made wooden yoke collar.

Nancy Kalal and her ox-in-training, Red, led a group of volunteers from the East Haddam Conservation Commission and others to deliver a bench for use by hikers walking the Goodwin Trail.

Nancy urged her aspiring ox forward, dragging a makeshift sled that held the bench over glacial cobbles, tangled roots, and through a mossy-banked stream. There was no time to be wasted, and a product to be delivered. The crew clambered behind and alongside, cell phone cameras in hand.

We all stopped at the appointed location. The bench was lifted and placed, and, smiling, we posed for a group picture. This was not your everyday volunteer stewardship workday. And it got me thinking: hauling wood for a board walk, removing invasive plants, building trails—these are necessary land stewardship tasks that Red could support while reducing the level of disturbance to the natural landscape.

And it’s fun and somehow satisfying to see a working animal, his handler, and the communication between the two. It’s a pace and context that harkens back to a slower time, but one that helped establish New England in its day. And just might be useful today, too.

Judy Preston is a local ecologist active in the Connecticut River estuary. Her Gardening for Good column appears in each issue.