Oxen Harness Questions

I have seen horse collar used on an ox but the result was a sored ox! If you want to work an ox single then I’d use a single yoke with britchen. A steers neck and sholders are just too different from an equine to use the same rig.

@BachelorFarmer 2545 wrote:

I saw a picture once of a Bennett Buggy with an ox team wearing harness.

A former employer of mine, an old farmer who grew up in the horse days, said that some farmers still used oxen but not with yokes. They put a horse collar on upside down, unbolted the hames from the traces and turned them over (so the harness is right side up but collar and hames are upside down) then hooked them like a team of horses. I don’t know whether they used a whip or voice or what to drive them. I think it would be an odd sight.

When I was a kid I tried hooking two jersey bull calves into a homemade steel yoke I made. Not successful….

Yep , I,v also heard about tuning a horse collar upside down , of course it would also depend on the size of the collar and the ox . Breeching is pretty easy to make and works fine holding a cart or wagon back descending hills , although brakes make it easier .
Yolks and bows eithere singe or double are easy to make and a lot cheaper and easier to make than collars

goodluck — Mat

in the book about oxen yokes are prefered to collars. if a collar is to be used, it’s the best to use the swiss three pad collar, developed especially for the bovine anatomy.

when using the collar the advantages over a yoke are that the animals can differ in size, and that hornless animals can also be worked.
the bad thing is that no matter what the design, the collar is more complicated to maintain.

also, go to this page: http://prairieoxdrovers.com/collars.html

maybe the forehead padded yoke could intrest you. less maintainence

good luck!

Niether the yoke or collar will sore the ox if it is fitted and used right!!!!

We have been “field-testing” our new ox-hames/collar pad setup similar to the pictures posted by bivol on our 2 yr old water buffalo team. I measured and recorded the contours of the buffaloe’s necks with wire, and went from there. The pictures i saw were of oxen pulling what appeared to be fairly light wheeled vehicles with rather light, dainty looking hames. I was worried that such narrow hames would bite into necks/shoulders under heavier load, so made ours considerably more robust than the ones in pics – a little less than 3″ deep (from laminated oak) for more surface contact.

Harrow chains are attached as tugs to heavy rings on each hame. I put a flexible plastic sleeve over the chains for length of animal’s contact. Around the girth of the animal, behind the legs, i strapped a horse-cinch setup, with rings attached at midbody to hold the tugs. So far i have not used britchen, but i anticipate this in the future, and intend to simply rig something from soft cotton rope – (i notice the British and others overseas make a lot more use inexpensive rope and chain in their rigs than we do over here, and for the sake of economy, intend to do more of this myself – i used sisal rope for single driving lines, for instance, and actually liked the handling better than my biothane ones that cost a whole hell of a lot more!)

The off ox is attached by it’s halter rope to a ring on the hames of the nigh ox. Everything is attached to the doubletree. If one ox is pulling faster than the other, I chain his end of the double tree back to the implement and this helps even things out. Control is more loosey-goosey than with a yoke, but it’s coming along, and one could experiment with britchen ropes, i suppose. My animals seem more comfortable in this rig and we’ve had them out in the fields pulling a sledge loaded with rocks, tires and people.

So far so good. I look forward to doing some real work with this rig in a years when my team is old enough. I feel better about using this system after reading about the inefficiency and discomfort of the neck-yoke here, and elsewhere –

http://www.fao.org/ag/againfo/resources/documents/gender/war/warall/v0600b/v0600b0j.htm

I also look forward, given the room this system gives to adjust and accomodate growth, to not having to carve a bunch more yokes!

I’ll post some pics of the new rig in action when the weather gets a little milder – minus 20 and below is too cold for working water buffalo!