[goodcompanion]

You could do it. Whether it would be worth the effort is another question.

The low-hanging fruit of energy capture from draft animals is direct use of their pulling power, or failing that, to transfer pulling power into rotary power (as in having oxen turn a millstone, or walk on a treadmill to accomplish work with the rotary motion of the treadmill shaft). Any proposition of transferring the energy to electricity and storing it, and then using the stored electricity later in a motor will involve such losses along the way as to make it very technology and time-intensive relative to the benefit.

for instance if you have two oxen walking on a treadmill, they will apply about 1600 watts to the treadmill shaft (about 2 hp). But the shaft speed is low and you will need to use a gearbox to increase RPM, which will reduce efficiency. With a 75% efficient gearbox you could apply about 1200 watts of power to your alternator. If your alternator has 80% efficiency you have 960 watts available to store. If your storage system is 90% efficient then you have 864 watts available to use, or 0.86 kilowatt hours, for each hour the team of oxen work. This is worth about 20 cents at the rates I pay. Then to use this stored electricity in a vehicle you need to buy and maintain a storage system and voltage regulator as well as maintain your EV itself. All these components age and need to be replaced at intervals.

You could do it, theoretically, but all the tech to accomplish this is pricy, and the management of the team on the treadmill takes up your time. The gain is small. And in the end, you have your electric vehicle charged up. It can zip around a little faster than a team of oxen with a cart, but that zipping comes with a heavy price tag. Easiest way to use drafts for transportation is to come up with a cart and hit the road. Our problem with that is that as a culture we feel we must have speed. But though slow, it is many times more efficient than any electric application of draft animal power.

As for manure digesters, many of the same issues apply. It is unlikely that you could capture enough energy in a small-scale digester to measure up to the amount of energy you could capture just by using the drafts to accomplish mechanical tasks directly. Large-scale digesters aren’t any better, really, at best they recapture a fraction of the (fossil fuel) energy being wasted in large-scale livestock operations.

[goodcompanion]

I am actually doing a gmo-free sugar beet trial this year for small-scale sugar manufacture. You can read the grant description here:

http://www.nesare.org/Grants/Get-a-Grant/Farmer-Grant/Farmer-Grant-Examples/2011-Farmer-Grants/From-seed-to-sugar-A-vertically-integrated-model-for-small-scale-turbinado-sugar-production

I was to do it last year but the seedlings washed out. Now going to try again in 2012. I am curious about the market for the likes of “speedi-beet.” Ellen, maybe you can tell me what you pay for it, or maybe even who carries it and how popular of a product it is?

Sugar beets yield usually 15 tons to the acre and up. About 10 % of that weight is dry beet pulp, a by-product of making sugar or alcohol. I have no idea what it’s worth. One Vermont feed mill offered to pay me $250 per ton for dry certified organic pulp, but maybe a farmer could get a lot better selling direct.

[goodcompanion]

Bienvenue,

We’re 3.5 hours from Sherbrooke here. This is a great board with a lot of experienced teamsters not so far away from you.

Someday maybe we will have enough francophones for a langue francaise sub-forum.

[goodcompanion]

I spent lots of expensive time running heavy equipment for my rice project. I have to agree with Carl, operating it is strangely stressful on the body. There is a lot of force lurching around in a way that is very hard to tune to physically. Unlike riding a horse or being on board a boat at sea, it’s weirdly enervating.

The same work I did could have been done with a big gang of men and some teams but, being where we are as a culture, easier to write some big checks and go to town with rented equipment.

[goodcompanion]

@near horse 29893 wrote:

I don’t think the loss of various “skills” is anything new. Probably been going on since the earliest humans. When a newer, easier method becomes available, it is usually embraced and the previous technology/skill falls by the wayside.

I’m not sure how one can market their operation – even if it’s a sole proprietorship horselogging or organic farming without “selling” the way they operate or how they do stuff – perhaps even why they do it a certain way etc. Isn’t that still pitching? Perhaps our claims aren’t hollow like those of the big guys but we’re in the same game IMO.

We’re in the same game because it is the only game in town. We all must do business in imperial coin.

To my mind the main value of a skill-embedded farming, logging, or craft operation is that it can function both in the realm of reciprocal, non-currency-based exchange, and, albeit in a more debilitated way, in the mainstream cash economy. (I do feel that when it comes to a “marketing” contest the larger players will always have a leg up on us) But the fact that we can exist and function in the cash economy allows us to preserve skills and show through our example one alternative way of providing ourselves with basic goods and services.

Yes of course loss of skills has been going on since time immemorial, but don’t you agree, Geoff, that the pace of this deskilling has picked up an incredible amount of momentum in the last 100, 50, 30 years? The quantity of basic physical and social functions that we humans can no longer carry out without the aid of vast corporations is totally staggering. In fact as I go through my day almost everything I interact with is provided by a large corporation or government entity, and even when I interact with people who live in my town, most of the time the communication passes through media provided by corporations. And a big shout-out to Dell, Fairpoint, Green Mountain Power, and Microsoft for helping me whine about it the internet, the irony is not lost on me.

The path of history is, it’s true, old methods being abandoned as newer and easier ones become available. But another theme of history is that consolidation invariably runs its course, crashes, and those who are left to pick up the pieces often must resort to older ways to cobble together a living amongst the wreckage as best they can.

[goodcompanion]

@near horse 29871 wrote:

All the “free lunches” have already been eaten, so to speak. Now we have no more places to go when we over use an area and that requires some serious creative thinking.

Or, if you prefer, some serious creative denial.

[goodcompanion]

@dlskidmore 29861 wrote:

Sustainability is possible, but the buzzword in my college ecology classes “sustainable growth” is not.

Good grief. What kind of ecologist could possibly endorse a concept like “sustainable growth?”

[goodcompanion]

@near horse 29854 wrote:

Regarding the whole concept of sustainability, it’s a great goal but like immortality or the perpetual motion machine, never achievable. That doesn’t mean that employing more sustainable practices isn’t a good thing but things (economies, weather, markets, life) are not static so we’re trying to reach a moving target.

I kind of have to disagree with this. Just because we live in a time when the word is so misused doesn’t mean that it is an impossible concept. You have past civilizations that have had peaks and troughs with dynastic cycles, like Egypt, Peru, and China, but on the whole have had durable agricultural systems that continued much in the same vein for thousands of years without significant degradation. If we can’t achieve this anymore, that is a problem with us, not with the idea of sustainability.

However if by “sustainability” we are actually talking about some way for the entire global culture to morph and become sustainable, and presumably one that doesn’t entail the planet’s 7 billion dying back to a population of a few hundred million, then I agree. The word is a waste of time for those who see the problem at hand, and false hope for those who are in the dark.

[goodcompanion]

As Don Hewes very aptly put it, none of us will really know what sustainability is until it comes up behind us and bangs us over the head. Or words very much to that effect.

I’m very doubtful that goods or services billed as green, sustainable, socially conscious, what-have-you, sold through the mass market, will ever have much of an impact on the trajectory of the culture.

Possibly the only way to truly redirect the nature of business is to cut capital out of the equation and engage in reciprocal exchanges on an extremely local level.

[goodcompanion]

Right on. Michael, my estimation of you just went up.

I’ve long believed that B and J were more part of the problem than anyone around me was willing to accept. Our collective willingness to be “greenwashed” is pretty high, I guess.

Things like this much on my mind as I am attending a sort of alternative farming entrepreneurship conference shortly. Most of me believes that capital always works to the detriment of sustainability in the end. On the other hand a total lack of it isn’t so great either.

[goodcompanion]

As ice cream companies go I suppose you could do worse. B and J started out with very high ideals, became very successful, and ultimately sold out to an international food conglomerate several years ago. Supposedly the day to day operations are unchanged and certainly the factories in-state are still big sources of employment, but the high ideals are gone forever. What started out as an ice cream to change the world, in the end, just makes you, and the corporation that sells it to you, fat.

I used to live in St. Albans where the largest plant is. They gave away 3 pints of seconds to their workers every day. Of course nobody can eat 3 pints of that kind of ice cream per day and survive very long. So most turn it down. I knew some people that hoarded it in basements, and in fact there was a weird pseudo black market in seconds. Large quantities were exchanged for day to day goods and services, like an oil change for 100 pints of karamel sutra with the caramel cores off-center.

[goodcompanion]

There are a whole bunch of Victorian hotels on the “Georgia Shore” of Vermont (Franklin County). For whatever reason they were built on the New York side of the lake and slid across the ice and installed on foundations in Vermont. Huge buildings. Dozens of oxen. And thicker ice than you can count on these days.

[goodcompanion]

Hello Marie,

Welcome to the site. You can learn a lot here.

I’ve been to Brittany quite a while ago, and was a stagiere agricole in the southwest. I’m interested to learn more about the state of draft power in France and Europe.

[goodcompanion]

I could possibly come if my team could catch a lift up and back from Ferrisburgh. 25 minutes away down 116 and the Vergennes-Monkton Road.

[goodcompanion]

No idea where built or anything like that, but I have one just like it. Probably worth about a hundred bucks unless it had new handles installed, then maybe 150.

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