Suffolk

The Suffolk is the only draft breed developed purely for farm work and never selected for anything else. Not for show, not for the road, not for war. That single-mindedness is the whole story of the horse.

It comes from the English counties of Suffolk and Norfolk, where heavy horses go back to the 1500s. The North Sea borders almost the entire region, and the isolation plus the value of the horses meant they were bred pure and have changed very little in three hundred years. Every horse in the studbook traces its male line to one stallion, Crisp's Horse of Ufford, foaled in 1768.

What that produced is a horse with the strength and stamina to plow heavy clay, hardy, willing, and an easy keeper. They are always chestnut. There is no other color in the breed.

The first ones went to Canada in 1865 and the US in 1880. They turned up in the Midwest, New England and Ontario, but never rivaled the Percheron, Belgian or Clydesdale. Numbers rose in the 1930s, fell after the Second World War, and the breed came close to disappearing worldwide. Note that this is the horse, not the Suffolk sheep.