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Hey Mitch, Thanks for sharing your experience.

Working with 3 is harder with cattle than horses, but its something for us to work with. I figure that if we get our breeding in the right synch, we could always have at least 1 of our 2 dairy cows who isn’t near calving to make a team of 3. The shorthorn cows are just a hair smaller than the Devon oxen. Having 4 is even better. Now it gets back to figuring out the right way to work cattle 3 abreast.

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Do still have the 2 way sulky plow for sale?

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This subject has already been brought up in the forum. This thread might be helpful:
http://www.draftanimalpower.com/showthread.php?3982-HD-no-till-drill

Also, this article might be helpful, but maybe not:

http://www.betuco.be/CA/No-tillage%20Farming%20for%20Sustainable%20Development.pdf

When I was at tiller’s international last winter, they had some information about a project using oxen for no-till in Africa. So you’re not crazy.

-Hope that helps
Ben

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This is probably also posted elsewhere on this forum, but worth linking to again:
Tillers International Implement draft manual .

This may be helpful for comparing different tasks, and understanding how much of a load you’re going to be asking of her in different situations. As everyone else has said, you don’t want to hook her to something you aren’t sure she can pull.

I’m not an experienced plowman but there are a lot of factors that could impact your choice of plow size and whether it makes sense to try to plow with her at all. Two very important ones would be soil texture and how you plan to use the plow. Plowing 8 inches deep on clay or clay loam soil, the plow that you show there could be difficult for a full-grown team to pull, let alone a single heifer. If you have very sandy soil, and only plan to plow to 2 or 3 inches, that plow might be usable with a very large single cow. I agree with Andrew that an 8 or even 6 inch plow, if you can find one, would be much better sized to your heifer.

If you’re breaking ground, get someone to come with a tractor (or a team of large animals).

If shes well broke, there’s a lot of work that she could do with you in the garden, especially cultivating and ridging.

For bales:
In my experience, a round bale on a stoneboat is a light to moderate load for a full grown team (about 200-250 lbs force). Last spring I pulled 2 at a time on a stoneboat as part of conditioning for plowing.
Theoretically, a 1000 lb heifer could be worked up to pulling a 600 lb bale a short distance on a sled, but that might not be where you want to go.

If your terrain is very level, you could roll the bale with the bale speared on each side, and hooked to the traces. I’ve used this setup to roll out bales, and it seems like a pretty light load. It would be pretty dangerous going downhill…
Possibly you coul even rig a similar setup with shafts so she could hold back the load?

Enjoy working with your girl.

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I’d like to echo everyone else: great event, I learned a lot.

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Hi Henk,
Thanks for the tip. I just ordered a used version of that book for $9.15 including shipping. I figure its worth the try. If that doesn’t work, I’ll see if my library can get it on loan from another college- one of the nice perks of working for a college.

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Here’s the : link
Its a Cornell survey article on animal traction for development from 1980
On page 27, the researchers summarize the various studies that they dug up related to working cows in Germany, including the one that I mentioned above. I’d love to look at the originals, but I can’t speak German.

Do you know what edition of SFJ that article appeared in?

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I found some neat numbers in an old cornell publication on animals for traction:

In one study of 69 farms in Germany (1948), the moderate-production milk cows used for draught produced 4344 kg milk/year if not working and 4066 kg/year if worked 700-1000 hrs per year. That is equivalent to losing a little less than 80 gallons of milk a year, or about a gallon for every ten hours of work. On days that the cows worked a for 5 hours, milk yield decreased by 10-20%. If you’re selling raw milk and don’t have enough to meet demand, that means that working a team of cows costs about $1-$2 an hour. If you have too much and the milk would otherwise go to a calf or to the pigs…

Other studies suggested that “light work” may actually increase milk yield, while working an animal hard for long hours could cause milk output to collapse.

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@Oxhill 37798 wrote:

What breed of cow are you training?

Durhams! I’ll send along pictures soon.

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I’d like to say that after 3 times with our milk cow and her 20 month old heifer in the yoke, it seems a heck of a lot easier to train two cows that are already halter-broke than it is to train a team of calves. Now that I say that, it seems like a pretty obvious observation, but it didn’t really occur to me before someone broke my mental block around working cows.

Given that so many homesteaders and smallholders keep a family cow or two, the use of cows for traction seems to be extraordinarily under-rated in the US.

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In VT, on silt-loam bottomland, we get somewhere between .75 (for our poorest ground) and 1.75 (on our richest ground) tons per acre in the first cut, which averages out to around 2 tons/acre for 2 cuts. When we get to liming the poorer ground this fall, I’m sure we’re going to see those low end yields pop up. It sounds like a little less than 2 tons is a safe number to start with for shopping around.

I second everyone’s comments on the importance of management, and soil type plays in as well. If you’re considering a specific piece of land, Web Soil Survey could be a useful tool. Web soil survey will give you the “potential” productivity for a couple different crops for all of the soil types on your prospective farm. Though to the Soil Service, “potential” productivity is how much you could get with chemical fertilizers, so you’d want to round down quite a bit from their estimates.

Happy hunting, happy haying!

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Hi all,
I wanted to bump this discussion back up.
1st- to invoke godwins law I believe the German ban on the headyoke was passed by the Nazis, who passed very restrictive animal welfare laws in the 1930’s. I guess that makes me a fascist for using a neck-yoke.

2nd- To tim- wouldn’t your data at the top of this thread suggest that two oxen in single yokes or collars with traces would work more effectively than two oxen in a double yoke, due to additional draft buffering of 4 chains rather than 1? Do you think or know that these observations would also be true for plowing and other tasks? Would the difference in draft be higher or lower?

Also, for comparing 2 animals in collars vs 2 animals in a standard double yoke, if the load is buffered much better by hitching with traces/eveners, shouldn’t that partially compensate for the fact that the collar is not suitable for “heavy duty work?” If draft is almost 20% lower, that could easily change a “heavy” job to a lighter one.

Thanks,
Ben

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Its nice to hear everyone’s thoughts on this issue. I think everyone agrees that it is intensely personal. Relationships with working animals are deeply special, and if butchering an animal at the end of its working life feels like a violation of that, then I think that is too high a price to pay for some hundreds or thousands of lbs of meat. My personal feeling is that it doesn’t.

Carl, with regards to what is “traditional” I agree that it is very much time and space dependent. For the most obvious example: what percentage of cattle working today are in India? I know that during some periods of time in Europe, there have been taboos against eating oxen as well. So to call it “traditional” might be slightly misleading, but we do see what we’re doing as being consistent with the tradition of working cattle that we identify ourselves with.

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I’d just like to add that the offer goes out to anyone pretty much anywhere in NH as well.

-Ben

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Thanks Tim!
When you don’t have a cart or anything with shafts behind you, what is the advantage of the brichen over just a belly band with loops? Is it just helping to keep the yoke in place, or is there more?

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