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Steven Leslie, in his new book, suggests attaching the gauge wheel from a walking plow to the cutter bar.
I don’t know if he’s actually done this, or if its 2nd hand, or how it would be attached.

I’m interested in this for clipping pasture, because when using rotational grazing, I’m worried about clipping regrowth from grazed plants if I don’t get to it within a few days.
Then, the mower would violate “the law of the 2nd bite” and severely stunt regrowth

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I have another article, from Sweden that does try to make the direct comparison of horses vs tractors. The article uses “emergy” analysis, which is a little bit of a complicated methodology, but basically tries to put all energy in terms of the solar radiation contained in it. Things that are farther from solar radiation, such as fossil fuels (solar radiation transformed into plants, some of which didn’t fully decompose, etc) are charged a higher value. Understanding the exact details is not super important to the points I’m making though, though.

The big takeaways from this article:

1.) All told, tractors were slightly more “emergy” efficient than horses in generating tractive work (force on the drawbar times distance.

2.) But horses were based on 60% renewable sources, while tractors only used 9% renewable.

3.) Possibly most interesting: Though the horses were less efficient at generating tractive work, they required less emergy/ha for farming, because the soils farmed by the horses had lower bulk density (due both to manure application and less compaction,) so implements in the horse-powered farm required less draft to do the same work.

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To clear up any confusion (I’ve read this paper front-to-back at least 10 times):

This paper doesn’t compare the energy efficiency of horses and tractors. Rather, its an insanely detailed account of all of the inputs (converted to energy) on a model mixed-power low-input farm in the midwest, put together by the land institute. To give you an idea of the level of detail: if someone went to town to buy a bolt, they charged for the energy to make the bolt and the energy to get to town (the gasoline, and the depreciation on the truck.)

Originally, they hoped to use the horses very extensively, but (probably due to teamster staffing challenges) the horses were only used about 115 hours/yr. Because of this, they used a lot of (tractor) energy to grow the horse feed, making the horses less energy efficient than the tractors.

Because the highly underutilized horses were a drag on the farm’s labor/energy efficiency, they used their database to simulate what the farm’s productivity would have been if all of the work had been done by tractors.

I’m sure that the study’s authors would totally disagree with the conclusion that it shows anything about the relative energy efficiency of horses and tractors in general, just that on that farm, which couldn’t use horses nearly as much as they planned, having horses made them less energy efficient.

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Andy,
What types of techniques are you using for “min-till” right now? Does that include you “coultervator” and harrows?

Right now we plow 2 out of 3 years in a rotation, with 1 year being prepped with a disc, which is “reduced” but I wouldn’t say “minimum” tillage. Though there are a lot of things to work out, reducing tillage and farming with draft animals seems like a good fit, if only because it makes peak fieldwork season more manageable. Depending on the farming system and how many hours we can “log” (literally or figuratively) with the animals in the winter, spring can be really tough with so much ground to turn over. It often is for us.

One smaller but potentially significant benefit is that if reduced tillage improves soil structure, it should reduce draft on plows by a modest amount, making the heavy tillage a little easier when we do have to use it.

Is there anyone who uses permanent ridges with animal-powered ridge-till?

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Loose hay certainly has a lot of advantages, and for a lot of folks, its definitely an answer.

 

The capital-intensity of biofuels especially, and also a lot of other technologies,  underscores the need for cooperation for sustainability in a low energy future. And the low tech solutions, like loose hay, require a lot of labor, so you still need your neighbors.

In twenty years, I’d like to have one or two bio-diesel processors in my county, a neighbor with a loader-tractor, a neighbor with a motorized forecart, and enough people in my community farming with animals that we could string up a 20 animal hitch if we ever needed it! (not even sure why we would)

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Steven, heres another way to think of it:

If you get 200 bales an acre in 2-3 cuttings and 3000# an acre of oil from rapeseed, then you would need 1 acre of oilseed for each 150 acres of hay baled. (Did I do that math right!?) Plust you get seed meal and stubble pasture. Of course, if you have a motorized forecart, you will probably use it for other tasks too, but a small animal-powered farm could easily get away with an acre or less of oil crops.

 

Another thought would be sugar beets for ethanol. The beet pulp could substitute for at least some of the grain in a working ration, or a supplement for “100% grass-fed” dairy or beef (I know that beets aren’t a grass, but since beets are fiber-based, most companies allow them in grass-fed protocols.)

All of these options face the problem that a small farmer won’t need very much fuel, and harvesting the crop either requires specialized equipment or a lot of heavy labor. The same with equipment regarding the processing…

 

 

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For some context on biodiesel-

For rape or canola, it takes 20 lbs of seed to make a gallon of biodiesel, which is worth just slightly less than a gallon of diesel, or slightly more than a gallon of gasoline. At 3000#/ac, that’s a little less than 1500 sq ft for Donn’s 5 gallons needed per thousand bales. That looks pretty favorable to me!

Coincidentally, the corn to ethanol ratio is also about 20 lbs to the gallon. Your yields of corn would usually be higher. A lot of this probably comes down to what equipment/expertise different folks have.

If a fraction of an acre of fuel crops can provide supplemental power for high-energy tasks during tight windows in a peak working season, it seems like this a pretty powerful synergy between the two technologies. Because the amount of power needed on a farm is pretty bounded by these “choke points” you might be able to farm a substantially larger area with the same number of animals by adding a few gallons of fuel to the mix.

Very interesting.

btw andy- I wasn’t seriously suggesting that you manufacture the apparatus, just that it would make my day to see a behemoth like that!

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Andy,

Thanks for helping me to understand the physics behind this.

Let me know when you build the ultra-heavy-duty forecart for 8 horses with crawler tracks and a power-regulating flywheel!

It seems like having a way to add/subtract water for weight might be a good way to change weights relatively conveniently.

 

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Hi andy,
I can’t speak about this from experience, but I’ve talked to a handful of researchers and a couple of farmers about it pretty in depth. So, don’t take my word too seriously. We plow our rye in the spring, for a number of different reasons. If the rye gets too tall, its hard to plow it well, and when its around 2 feet tall, its really tenacious.

However, interestingly, I’m pretty sure that this whole system depends on the rye getting WAY away from you. Most of the time, farmers are rolling/mowing rye that is 5-6 ft tall, sometimes taller. At this point, when the rye is shedding pollen, it is pretty much physiologically incapable of regrowing after disturbance. Joel Gruver at University of Western Illinois has actually gotten a pretty reliable kill simply by driving over the cover crop with a no-till drill.

I think the middle-ground is the hardest with rye. ex: The Nordells either keep rye really short with mowing and plow it when it is no more than a couple inches tall, or they let it get really tall and kill it with only a disc. For us, it would be hard to wait that long some years. I think its worth a try on a small plot where you can afford to wait.

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Hi Jared,
A couple of points that I’ve heard from the various researchers
-Make sure the rye is shedding pollen before you crimp. (Vetch is a little harder to judge, but it needs to be near full flower.)
-You don’t necessarily need a roller-crimper to do this, indications are that a sickle-bar mower works just as well. The main advantages of the roller crimper are that the plants are still attached to the ground, and thus a clog is much less likely to build up in a no-till planter, the mulch is more even, and the roller-crimper has a lower draft.

Keep in touch about how this works out.

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I talked to Jeff Moyer from the Rodale institute this weekend about organic no-till using a roller-crimper. He knows a few Amish farmers using the Roller-crimper with horses. The system is tricky, but you could probably cover a lot more ground with the crimper than with a plow. I’d be surprise if a good team couldn’t do over 10 acres in a day.
The system has a lot of tricks to it, but if you manage those, it would make it much more feasible to farm a lot of ground with horses and without chemicals (or with far less chemicals). The consensus is that this system is a lot easier to adopt for beans than corn.

A couple of links:
http://www.croproller.com/models-prices
http://rodaleinstitute.org/our-work/organic-no-till/

Ben

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You may get more hits on this if you put it in the “Buy-Sell Equipment” forum about a half a page down from here.
I’m sure you’ll find someone around here who can help you.

Good luck.

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RW,
I & J manufacturing makes Ground drive motors that are a little bigger, and also sets them up for trailing or 3 pt hitch pto. I’ve never used one, and only seen it work once, so I can’t comment on it’s quality too much.

Just as predicted in this thread, the riding version is over $5k before shipping.

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Thanks again to everyone for their comments and suggestions.
We did speak with ray ludwig, and he felt that nothing would be a problem if we keep them fit.
Hopefully we’ll have a few student teamsters who want to pull a loaded stoneboat around in circles while we wait for the ground to get dry in March.

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Tim, come to think of it, that hayloader draft measurement was from one of the largest loads that we ever brought in (1.75 tons of hay in 1 wagon).
Also, we have pneumatic tires, but one was quite a bit under-inflated.

One of the thoughts that you bring up, Tim, is to work periodic (needed only once every couple years) deeper tillage around the lactation of the cows, so that we can bring 4800 lbs of bovine muscle to that job.

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