You're listening to an airwave media podcast.

Ben Franklin's world.

The podcast dedicated to helping you of Ben Franklin's world.

The podcast dedicated to helping you learn more about how the people and events of our early American

past have shaped the present day world we live in.

And I'm your host, Liz Kovart. Establishing colonies in North America

took an astonishing amount of work. Colonists had to clear the land of trees which meant

felling the trees and eventually removing tree stumps from the newly cleared fields.

Planting crops that they could eat and sell, weeding and intending those crops,

and then they had to harvest those crops and get the crops they intended to sell to the nearest market town so that they could sell them.

And that's just some of the work involved if you want to establish farms in the colonial setting.

Now as you know from listening to this podcast,

most colonists did not perform this work on their own.

They listed the help of children and neighbors,

purchased in slave people,

and they used animals.

Andre Jeter is the Bill and Jean Lane director of Coach and Livestock at the Colonial

Williamsburg Foundation and he joins us today to explore the animals the, later British colonists brought with them to North America and then used to build, run, and sustain their colonial farms and cities.

Now, animals provided many benefits to early Americans.

So Andre is also here to share information about some of the Colonial Wainsburg Foundation's efforts

to bring back the population numbers of some of these historic animal breeds through its rare breeds program.

Now during our exploration Andre reveals details about the livestock English

...