BY NICK PEARCE
Adam Watson stands in the East Tennessee morning with the kind of stillness that comes from years spent around horses and emergency scenes. The light catches the gate behind him—a simple farm gate, unremarkable to most. But Watson sees it differently now. He sees the hidden labour, the assumed two hands, the quiet transfer of risk that happens when a person with one functional arm works through rural tasks with one functional arm.
Watson grew up around ranch and horse work in East Tennessee, then spent more than two decades in emergency response, working-dog operations, and industrial field environments. In 2018, a brachial plexus injury left him with permanent loss of functional use of his right arm. He spent years in rehabilitation, but the real rebuilding—the kind that matters in rural life—did not happen in a clinic.
“I stopped asking only, ‘Can I do this movement?’ and started asking, ‘Can I run the entire sequence safely, under pressure, when the first method fails?'” Watson explains.
He is now building The Sanctuary Foundation, an early-stage project intended to create a land-based environment where disabled people can develop what he calls “measurable capability”—not through performance theatre or single demonstrations, but through repeated, supervised, meaningful work. The foundation does not yet operate as a full campus; it is a developing framework built on lived experience.
For Watson, rural work is never just one action. It is a chain: preparing equipment, reaching the work area, controlling an animal or load, performing the primary task, handling unexpected failure, cleaning and maintaining equipment, and repeating the job later under fatigue or bad weather. He describes this as the “complete-task test”—prepare, perform, recover, repeat.
The test does not ask whether somebody can look capable for thirty seconds. It asks whether the person can complete and repeat a meaningful task without quietly transferring the difficult parts to somebody else.
He demonstrates this by describing something as ordinary as moving a horse through a gate. The visible act is opening the gate. The actual task, however, includes approaching through mud, managing a lead rope, controlling the horse’s position, releasing a latch under tension, preventing the gate from swinging, moving through the opening, keeping the horse from crowding or turning, closing and securing the gate, and recovering if the rope, latch, animal, or ground does something unexpected.
With one functional arm, every hand change matters. If the only hand is holding the lead rope, that same hand cannot simultaneously stabilise the gate, manipulate the latch, and create distance from the horse. A workaround might succeed on a calm day with a familiar animal, but fail when the ground is slick, the gate is loaded, the horse is anxious, or fatigue has reduced grip and reaction speed.
“The correct adaptation may involve changing the gate hardware, relocating the latch, creating a safe holding point, changing the approach angle, staging a tool, modifying the handling sequence, or deciding that a particular combination of animal and environment requires another person,” Watson says. “Independence does not mean pretending risk does not exist. It means understanding exactly where assistance is genuinely required and where poor design is creating unnecessary dependence.”
Fatigue is central to his thinking. When one arm carries nearly all handling, stabilisation, and protective reactions, small inefficiencies accumulate quickly. Repeatedly transferring a tool, pinning an object against the body, reaching across the midline, or compensating through the shoulder and back can turn an apparently successful method into an unsafe one later in the day.
Watson manages this by reducing unnecessary hand changes, staging equipment where the work actually occurs, using fixed holding points, selecting closures that remain manageable when wet or gloved, building deliberate stop points into tasks, and refusing to treat exhaustion as proof of commitment. “The goal is not to win one heroic attempt,” he says. “It is to preserve enough control to finish, recover, and do the job again.”
The assumption of two hands, he notes, appears everywhere in rural equipment: spring-loaded gate latches, ratchet straps, buckles, halters, fuel cans, chainsaw controls, tool cases, wheelbarrows, trailer couplers, jack handles, hitch pins, feed bags, hoses, electrical connectors, battery compartments, and maintenance tasks that require one hand to stabilise while the other turns, pulls, aligns, or releases. Sometimes the answer is a different product; sometimes it is a clamp, fixture, magnet, tether, longer handle, altered storage position, or changed work sequence.
“The best adaptation often is not a visibly ‘disabled’ product,” Watson emphasises. “It is ordinary equipment selected and arranged so the full task requires fewer simultaneous hand functions.”
His two decades in emergency response and working-dog operations taught him to think in sequences, contingencies, and consequences. In emergency work, a task is never just the visible intervention—it includes scene access, equipment preparation, communication, patient movement, documentation, cleanup, restocking, and readiness for the next call. Working-dog operations are similar: the visible search or training evolution rests on handling, transport, environmental assessment, reward systems, equipment maintenance, observation, and recovery.
After his injury, Watson applied the same logic to himself. That moved his recovery away from what he calls “performance theatre” and toward repeatable operating capability.
Sanctuary’s approach, he explains, differs from a conventional accessibility checklist. Checklists are useful, but they can become too focused on whether a feature exists—a ramp, a reachable control, an adapted handle. The Sanctuary framework asks what the environment actually causes over time. Does it create agency, skill, responsibility, belonging, and useful contribution—or does it create hidden labour transfer, avoidance, fragility, and dependence?
“Adaptations should be judged in the real environment, across the full use cycle, with the disabled person participating in the design and evaluation,” he says. “It is not about lowering the standard until participation becomes symbolic. It is about changing the ecosystem so real capability can develop and be measured.”
The primary audience for his work is broader than one occupational group. It includes people rebuilding life after injury or disability, families carrying hidden workload, veterans and first responders whose former identity was tied to capability, and rural people whose access to formal rehabilitation, transport, training, or adaptive equipment may be limited. The agricultural and outdoor sectors matter equally, because equipment and workflows are often designed around an assumed able-bodied user.
Watson is careful not to claim proven programme outcomes. The Sanctuary is early-stage, and its current contribution is a framework, lived operational evidence, and a developing platform for testing how land, work, responsibility, and adaptation can support measurable growth.
“A person can be physically and cognitively capable of learning agricultural work and still have no practical doorway into it,” he observes. “Opportunity depends on transportation, land access, equipment, training, insurance, family support, employer risk tolerance, community expectations, and whether anybody is willing to let the person learn through supervised consequence rather than being protected from every meaningful task.”
There is also, he adds, a recognition problem. People may see the disability before they see the operator. Once expectations drop, the person receives fewer opportunities to practise, contribute, fail safely, and develop competence. Capability then appears absent when the ecosystem has simply stopped activating it.
For UK readers, Watson offers a careful caveat. The transferable lesson is to examine the complete work system rather than copying one American adaptation. Ask where the task assumes two hands, where labour quietly transfers to another person, and whether the method survives fatigue, weather, maintenance, and failure.
But he urges readers not to treat his experience as authority on British farming, disability law, agricultural standards, healthcare, or rural economics. “Those conclusions belong to British farmers, disabled rural workers, engineers, clinicians, and regulators,” he says. “My contribution is a bounded lived and practitioner perspective that may help sharpen the questions.”
Watson’s ranch and horse life taught him something fundamental about work and self-worth—that useful work creates a relationship between the person and the world. Animals do not respond to titles, intentions, or sympathy. Equipment does not care about explanations. The work gives immediate feedback: the gate is secured or it is not; the horse is settled or it is not; the water reached the trough or it did not.
“That can be humbling, but it can also restore dignity,” he reflects. “After injury, I did not need to be told endlessly that I still had value. I needed real responsibilities, honest feedback, and a way to become useful again. Self-worth cannot rest entirely on performance, but meaningful contribution is one of the strongest ways people rediscover agency and identity.”
His single most important piece of advice is deceptively simple: map the whole task before judging yourself or the disabled person.
“Write down every step from preparation through cleanup and failure recovery,” he says. “Identify which steps require simultaneous gripping, stabilisation, carrying, balance, or rapid release. Then remove unnecessary complexity one failure point at a time. Change the hardware, location, sequence, tool, animal position, or assistance plan until the method is safe and repeatable.”
“Do not build recovery around proving that you can force one dramatic movement. Build a system that lets you complete useful work tomorrow as well as today.”
Photograph attributions: © exclusive to Mr Adam Watson and The Sanctuary, Tennessee. Not to be republished or sold on.