[Dick Roosenberg]

@houstonmule 23930 wrote:

I for sure won’t try and yoke this bull. I would love to see someone try though, lol. He is quite a handfull and hates people. I’m toying with having a couple of his calves broke. Just an idea at this point. I would like to see if I could bring a team to someone and hire them to keep them for as long as it takes to train them to work and be safe. Then teach me what I need to know when they are broke. I have trained lots of horses and mules to drive but don’t know anything about training cows.

You should consider bringing a couple 3 to 12 Watusi calves to a Tillers’ Oxen Basics class to learn to train them and to work them all in the same week. We’d rather do that than train them for you.

[Dick Roosenberg]

Beautiful animals! Better fed than most that I have seen in Uganda. But you may be surprised about yoking them. I have seen them unfazed by crossed horns while in the yoke.

However, at their current ages, they may be more of a challenge to train.

[Dick Roosenberg]

I would love to see the design and test it. We have not been impressed by our tests of the 3 pad collar, especially under heavy draft. We keep looking for a better design than a well-fitted neck yoke. But we are quick to acknowledge that it does not work well on a single ox.

[Dick Roosenberg]

Oxen seem to gain comfort more from smooth and slick surfaces than from padded surfaces. I see more hair loss where padding is attempted.

If we bring the yoke around like a collar, we need to find a good way to protect the points of the shoulder in high draught work — ploughing and logging. The horse collar seems to work well on oxen when turned upside down and at low draught. But the shoulders of an ox move much more than the shoulders on a horse. Any yoke coming along the sides of the ox’s neck should probably be thin like the shafts of the bow of the neck yoke. It would be great if they would flex enough to accommodate the movement of the shoulders. This would keep continuous contact on each side of the neck.

It will take some good materials and clever design to accommodate the structure of the ox better than the old yokes have. Internationally, we at Tillers are experimenting with heavy walled PCV tubing for bows. It bends easily with heat and sand filling to keep it from collapsing. We have been amazed with a couple thousand in the field how few break. In work it flexes in interesting ways.

This thread has brought together some nice photos. Thanks.

[Dick Roosenberg]

Partridge’s book, Farm Tools, from England shows yoke designs similar to the Devon yoke in your illustration. These are different from the American norm (which are similar to the Wiltshire example) in that beam is not as deeply carved to craddle the neck in the neckseat. I wonder if that was not as necessary in the long cleared fields of England. Is Wiltshire more rocky than Devonshire?

Also, it seems from old literature that European farms were more likely to hitch multiple pairs (or spans) to pull a plough than American farmers. That would mean that their yokes asked less varied loads — especially with fewer spikes in draught.

Thanks for the pictures!

[Dick Roosenberg]

I have trained a couple pair of Watusi cattle. In their home territory of Eastern Uganda they are known as Ankole and have been bred and selected to be mild tempered despite the big horns. They are much longer legged than the local zebu of Uganda but less fiesty. In Uganda they were thought to be less appropriate for draft purposes than dairy because they had no hump of sibnificance. A well-fitted neck yoke can resolve that problem. You should give it a try!

I’ll attach a team that one of Tillers volunteers trained at a vocational school near Maska Uganda.

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