[Nat(wasIxy)]

Well I couldn’t do it. I went out, he stood nicely to be haltered, and gently held his head against my leg, and I crumbled. Then the bull, his friend, came up and touched his head to angus’ too which made it even worse, like he was saying goodbye!

[Nat(wasIxy)]

I hope you manage to find a home for yours Howie!

[Nat(wasIxy)]

A museum would be good except there’s nothing historical about him – not even any horns! Another thing I didn’t think about when I first picked him…

I’m glad I’m not the only one to have had to make this kind of choice…I’ve eaten others before, but they weren’t working out as oxen so it wasn’t anywhere near the same kind of issue.

[Nat(wasIxy)]

We have rules here which stop him travelling around like a horse, I would love to use him as a pack ox but every move he makes off the registered ‘holding’ has to be noted, reported to the government, and triggers a 6 day standstill period in which he can’t move again and no other animals on the holding can either, unless it’s straight to slaughter. Very restrictive to work around 🙁

Very, very few people work oxen in Britain, you can probably count them on one hand, and I really wouldn’t trust him unsupervised with a beginner; he isn’t perfectly trained, he was my first, and I didn’t think back then about how important it would be to for instance, teach him how to stand by himself for extended periods of time. 🙁

[Nat(wasIxy)]

wonderful cattle, thanks very much for posting anne!

[Nat(wasIxy)]

I think donkeys just never took off here like they did over the water? Except perhaps in Ireland, but they were still small over there as far as I know….a shame!

[Nat(wasIxy)]

Love this and…they are huge! we rarely get donkeys that big in the UK

[Nat(wasIxy)]

I’ve been doing more work with Peach recently and now I’m actually really enjoying the relationship we have. She may not be fast, but she’s steady as a rock and I feel qe have a genuine friendship I don’t have with the two boys. Angus is very independent and only wants to do the bare minimum of work before he can go back to lazing about with his girlfriends, and Ted is very much a mummy’s boy following me around. peach is like a real workmate.

[Nat(wasIxy)]

There is a different but equally enoyable dynamic with machinery I think – draught animals are friends and partners, it’s a special thing to have a huge animal do what you say. With machines, they are entirely man made, our metal babies, and it’s sort of liberating NOT to have to trust and respect and cajole and befriend and take care of them. You can just thrash a car round a rally course guilt-free!

[Nat(wasIxy)]

Yes plenty of silaging going on here too from the dairy boys.

I’ve managed to get some grazing for my bullocks – they’re going to our local church as they have a nice lot of grass there! We were going to send a bull and some cows but we were worried he’d topple gravestones!

My oxen are also going out on ‘the long acre’ (road verges) as there’s plenty there and the council will only mow it if we don’t make use of it and needs must…not sure what DEFRA think of that but we’ll worry about that later…

[Nat(wasIxy)]

@goodcompanion 27383 wrote:

I agree that medieval manorial insularity has nothing to do with draft animals or the size of the operation. But I disagree that there was as heavy a degree of trade as you suggest. Some goods did travel, but nothing on the scale of what would take place a few centuries later. The roads, warehouses, canals, ports, and ships were simply not up to the task, for one thing. A comparison of the displacement tonnage of a cogge (medieval cargo ship) of the 1200s versus a cargo fluyt of the 1600s tells a story of rapidly increasing trade volumes.

You could also argue that the medieval manor is not really a single operation but an agglomeration of interconnected smaller ones. The limiting factor in the size of a manor is the ability of people on the perimeter to reach the center in a timely fashion. The people within it share a culture and allegiange that separates them from other manors and the outside world. The manor was also created by external pressure. It was not an option for most to leave and try one’s luck elsewhere. This is why the manor is a poor model for anyone trying to create a large-scale animal power farm in the present day. We don’t share a culture, we don’t all swear fealty to the same lord, and we are all free to leave when we are fed up.

What you describe for your 5000 head operation sounds to me a lot more like ranching than farming. You may or may not be able to carry it out, that’s not of interest to me. Ranching as you point out, as in the American range in the Old West, scales up quite easily, as long as there is more grass over the next rise. But if the land is good land, ranching is just not as productive as farming. This is why medieval europe was engaged in farming (with pasturing as a crucial part of that) rather than ranching. Go to the African Savannah, or Wyoming or Western Australia, maybe ranching is the thing to do. But if you are farming, then you are up against inexorable problems of physics that will absolutely, certainly limit your scale.

OK I think we have a communication problem, as over here we don’t have ranching, it’s all just farming. And I don’t know that I’m quite convinced that what I’m doing is your definition of ‘ranching’ as we have beef & dairy cattle, pigs, sheep, arable and forage production! It all just hinges around the mobstocking idea and works into that. You may or may not be interested in what I can acheive, but I was just pointing out that I used that example because it’s me and what I know, yet people seemed to be suggesting I was applying that elsewhere…I’m not.

As far as the medieval thing goes, again we’re not on the same page. Rievaulx was an abbey, not a manor. It was also not an isolated case, it’s simply the one I know most about as it’s local. That system worked pretty well for them, and it was copied everywhere – the system got so big that everyone got jealous, and it all came to an end in the dissolution of the monastries and all that land and wealth filled up the king’s pockets nicely! But we’re talking he 1500s by that time, with massive trade well under way – not only wool but also spices, tobacco, sugar, tea, etc – all done oil free. The circumstances around that particular farm are not appropriate to us today but the simple fact remains that single ‘bodies’ managed to farm thousands of acres rather successfully for a long period of time with only draught animals and people to rely on. It’s possible, just different and I don’t share the apparent negativity about what people are prepared to do. Yes some people are very lazy and stupid, but not all! And not ‘all’ of them would need to work the land IMO, as we DO have some oil-free technology that we haven’t had in the past.

[Nat(wasIxy)]

@jac 27327 wrote:

A while back Highway posted on here of his guilt of buying a tractor. I feel I am somewhat of a fraud… I like the concept of using my horses to achieve the work i need to do. I also despair at the destruction of the planet and her resources. Big ag for me is never going to work long term and sustainably….. but… I am also a huge fan of fast cars, more powerfull the better and the smell of hot Castrol R should be bottled and sold:D… there… got it off my chest… just waiting for Geoff to “nuke” me now..
John

Me too! I like all transport, and the history of it…it’s just that I like animal powered transport the best. I grew up among bikers though so I’d love a triumph bonneville. I also did a lot of trainspotting with my stepdad as a kid and a steam engine is just very exciting to be around. I’d LOVE to drive a HGV lorry, or a freight train. They were my back-up career choices, lol. Any kind of transport or haulage, I’m there. I actually prefer all that to farmwork with animals, I’d rather be hauling something from land’s end to john o-groats with my oxen than ploughing….but farmwork is considerably safer than the roads thesedays 🙁

ETA: All I bear in mind is that oil will run out – I think personally we should be saving it for the fun stuff – bike racing maybe! rather than squandering it on everyday ploughing! hehe

[Nat(wasIxy)]

I did not say one family managing 1000 head of oxen would be easy peasy, please do not misquote – I seem to be going down on record here as suggesting things I’m not?

What I actually said was that as far as we go here (there’s 3 of us) we could easily work our system with 1000 head of cattle (beef), and look after them with the aid of oxen. Exact numbers of oxen needed would take some working out (but is a waste of energy in terms of this debate!), and I would not rule out having staff, in fact I think I would definately need them! And I remain confident that I would be able to find willing workers – too often we snub the rest of populace, but I’ve been on the receiving end of that snub myself, it took a long time for me to break into farming because nobody thinks ‘young people today’ will do anything, or if you look a certain way/are female you’re going to be able to ‘hack it’. Well, here I am – one of the best farm workers the people I’ve worked for have ever had; reliable, hardworking etc. I just needed to be given a chance.

Size is still not proven to me to be an issue. You mention the medieval example – sorry but yes, the big abbeys DID export vast quantities of materials all over the globe – wool! Most of their product went to italy! and it was all done with animals and oil-free ships. Similar financial concerns applied, in fact what did Rievaulx in was a debt to Italian merchants and the failure of a wool crop. Nothing to do with reliance on draught animals or the size of their operation – the same financial problems could ruin our small farm too. The notion of medieval peasants scratching away on a quarter of an acre to support themselves is only part of the story, agriculture has been largescale and global for centuries.

Also, the provided problems of distance don’t take much imagination to overcome – a farm of 1000acres does not need to graze everything together in one block, and be carting things from one side to the other. Yeah if you’ve got a big fat tractor and motor vehicles you can do that because you have the luxury of that, but if the tractor’s gone you may have to split things up and have smaller units within the whole. (just like small farms, but simply owned by one person, so the overall energy exhancge is still good, despite the farm being huge)

And we’re not used to using animal power so we get this idea that you can’t acheive very much with horses, but I’ve been reading about the history of the hackney breed local to me, and the distances they cover and the speeds they do it at are very respectable. How about your own cattle drives? I don’t know much detail but we must have been talking hundreds if not thosuands of miles, getting that beef across country just with horses and cattle and men? It would need to be a humungous farm for the size of it to REALLY pose a problem for animals in terms of getting about.

It’s possible, it’s just different.

[Nat(wasIxy)]

@jac 26040 wrote:

.. A student came up to me that day and was really excited by the aspect of new equipment and how this technology could help 3rd world countries feed themselves. His angle was what surprised me.. he said if we can make low tech, cheap and easily fixed farm equipment and with proper training for the farmers then they could feed them selves.. but he was looking to the future. He reconed one of the reasons these families are so big is because the farming is so manual dependant.. reduce the need for so much manual labour and you reduce the need for huge families.. was good to hear youngsters thinking this way…
John

This is exactly my view and why I support Tillers International. We were in the same position as third world countries not so long ago – when quality of life improves, birth rates come down; our government is now trying to convince people to have more babies! So for me, the way to bring birth rates down is to get people comfortable.

[Nat(wasIxy)]

@FELLMAN 26039 wrote:

Agri subsidies was and is the problem here, i can never understand how so many British farmers just do not like horses lthe level of dislike is unreal considering they did all of the work not so long ago , it annoys me to hear farmers telling me how much they like sheep cattle etc but they HATE horses ??? its strange im beginning to think its because a horse never did or will attract sub, but then its not about the money is it its about animals and a horse/pony imo is a beautiful elegant useful animal that should be admired, sadly as a UK farmer i in a minority i fear 🙁

You wanna try convincing people oxen are deserving of some kind of respect – all I hear is horse horse horse, they’re so pretty/worked so hard for us. Yet oxen put in thousands more years of work than horses? People just don’t care.

I’m a farmer and in general, don’t like horses. It’s 100% nothing to do with subsidy however, as I’ve never claimed any and never plan to. I grew up ‘horsey’ and went on to work in stables, but when I discovered oxen I never looked back! I think modern horses are spoilt brats, and I can’t stick driving past yet another weed-ridden overgrazed poached up pony paddock that could be productive ground. I find cattle much more beautiful than horses too – smooth, sweeping horns are a crown, horses have that long naggy face and long spindly nobbly legs 😀 Cattle are much neater to my eye.

Then there’s the people, and I think this is where the real issue is – the atmosphere I worked in on all the yards was abominable. Then there’s this weird attitude they have to the horses, like horses are some sort of sacred thing that should be worshipped by everyone else and have their every whim catered for – that gets people’s backs up.

I have to say the working horse community, naturally, is very different – more realistic and down-to-earth. The horses seem better behaved too. I am attracted to one breed of horse – the hackney. I’d like to see them saved from the brink and the old style, tough working hackney back. I wouldn’t describe my oxen as slow to work with but I do know that they couldn’t sustain a trot for 100miles, so if I wanted to do some serious travel, I’d need a hackney 😀

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