[Nat(wasIxy)]

Thanks! will have a look…

[Nat(wasIxy)]

We also forgot to mention that oxen would actually contribute to farm productivity in other ways – if you were working hundreds of oxen, you’d be producing a lot of valuable manure and beef!!

I’m not arguing for a complete ‘transition to oxen’, I don’t like to tell others what they should be doing, what I’m arguing is that if somebody out there has a large farm, if they WANTED to, it would be perfectly possible for them to work it successfully entirely with oxen/horses/mules/elephants/you name it. Size of the farm is a non issue, as if it makes economic sense on a small scale (without economy of scale to shield it from economic reality) then it will undoubtedly work on a large scale. YET, whenever we hear of a draught animal success story, there is always the hurried caveat stuffed on the end ‘will not work on large farms’. But, if that caveat is always applied, that person with the large farm won’t even try.

[Nat(wasIxy)]

Thanks guys but the issue isn’t the machine, we’ll be sticking with hand milking for the forseeable – cheap, and udder and raw milk friendly. The problem is getting them organised for the milking, we need some way of rounding them up, collecting, pushing them through, and of course this has to move with them every day if we don’t want to be taking the cows to the parlour…

[Nat(wasIxy)]

That scenario ignores (as many often do) that the tractor fuel will run out one day, and then they will be reliant on ‘current’ sunlight exactly the same (biofuel), unless we come up with this fuel technology (or something) and it immediately becomes affordable when the oil runs out…

Animals also make use of land that’s unsuitable for arable crops, and land like that occurs around arable areas – no reason the oxen/horses can’t be reared and fattened in poorer areas ready for transportation and work to the more work-intensive fertile areas. They will also live and work on waste, particularly in the case of oxen, it doesn’t have to be the human grade crops that go into them.

[Nat(wasIxy)]

@jac 26957 wrote:

I know none on here like governmental interfering in farming but I recon something has to be done to bring youngsters back to the land. Small scale farming is the entry level for new entrants.. yet they are presented with so few choices..
John

Something has to be done, but I never argue for government involvement – look at them right this minute, every single week in farmer’s guardian, saying ‘we need more new entrants….let’s give them some more training’…..training? TRAINING!? We don’t need any more training, we need MONEY. And I don’t mean they need to give us a handout, they need to stop charging us silly amounts for every little thing – 4×4 insurance for the under 25s, a trailer test, animal movement certificates etc. that the 60yr old farmers never had to deal with, it gives them a competitive advantage. We also need the money in the form of getting it back for the work we do! The best way to charm new entrants in is to show them it isn’t all doom and gloom!

[Nat(wasIxy)]

so we’re saying it would be physically possible but would need a cultural shift to bring it about?

I agree with that, however, constantly saying ‘but this only works on small farms’ after saying how great oxen/mules/permaculture/you name it is, that ‘larger scale’ person is only going to hear that, and dismiss it. I think if we’re going to rattle on about that, we need to explain that it’s nothing to do with size or efficiency, but culture.

However, I still do question whether the culture’s not up to it – I think there’s a good amount of people out there looking for work, and working with a team of horses or oxen, or in a permaculture farm mulching beds and picking cherries would appeal. Now, there IS a shortage of people willing to go pick vegetables, but good grief – even I don’t want to do that, it’s the same as working in a factory except you’re outdoors in january/the baking sun! A mixed farm would be different, with different seasonal work that would provide a bit of variety and interest, you’d be treated with respect and valued for your contribution and you’d love ‘your’ team etc.

I’ve obviously been investigating the british horse loggers a lot recently, and pleasingly it seems to be going from strength to strength and offering apprenticeships and things. Come the day, I feel confident about being able to find employees of the ilk above for my slightly larger scale operation….we’ll see. I like to be optimistic, it’s too easy to dump all over things.

[Nat(wasIxy)]

Don’t worry Oldkat, mobstocking’s worked so well on our beef we wouldn’t consider anything else for the dairy! However, we have a couple of things to work out first:

1) where to milk – our farm is one long strip, which means a lot of walking for the cows, and a very chewed up bit of ground that they walk on! Also, we have the beef herd to think about – how do we pick the jerseys out for milking everyday…or do we have to split them…that means completely re-organising the whole place! We would do that, but we’re just considering the possibilities. We might be able to milk out in the field, some kind of mobile parlour maybe…

2) grass based calf rearing. I’ve done a lot of experimenting, and so far results have been largely disappointing. Basically, each jersey calf needs a minimum of 6litres of milk/day for 6months in order to be anywhere near decent without grainfeeding. That’s £1500 per calf to rear in lost milk sales! I think we’ll just have to swallow that, but how to feed the calves? Leaving them with their mums overnight needs a lot of work separating them and possibly even more milk lost – nurse cows is initially labour intensive and a bit haphazard, and would require another separate grazing group. So we’re looking at feeding them ourselves twice a day, and if we have 12 calves, milking out 72litres of milk from the cows, only to deliver it straight to the calves…seems a bit labour intensive to me!

[Nat(wasIxy)]

@bivol 26939 wrote:

so, i won’t tell farming a huge farm with ox power is impossible, it’s just not feasable to catch on…too many people wouldnt want to tackle such a huge task, and even if they would , it’s likely to use horses and mules for this kind of big farm (1000 cares). there was a reason, after all, why horses were used and prefered to oxen in bigger farms: speed. as much as i love and prefer cattle to horses, i’l admit they’re faster.

I’m a little weeny bit surprised that you of all people have typed that bivol! 😉 We are always told that ‘horses are faster and that’s why oxen died out’. But, is that really correct? Not according to what I’ve experienced/read. That’s way, way too simplistic. Firstly, not all oxen are slow, just like not all horses are fast (I’ve known some real lazy, slow horses that you just can’t get out of a slow walk). There is a limit to how fast you can go in most work – would you want to plough at a canter? Angus is always rushing, it’s annoying. This is largely my ‘fault’ – I haven’t overworked him so far, and he has plenty of independent movement being worked in a collar, which was luxury unafforded to the oxen of yore.

Then you look at the history – without boring you to death with it, what I’ve read suggests far more that lack of decent equipment and harnessing and sympathetic training methods (that was all given to horses when they came in!) may go a long way to explaining why oxen have a reputation for being slow – they were working with what they had! In this country, we also had the factor of prestige, horses being always the rich man’s thing down the years, when ‘the common man’ could finally afford to get his hands on them, no way was he ‘going backwards’. This was well illustrated around the time of the wars, when some of the nobility switched back to oxen. They saved a lot of money doing it, and still acheived all their work, but it never caught on because the workers resented working such lowly animals – even when they were given smart harnessing, it just couldn’t match the pride of working a horse team.

Finally – it’s not all about speed is it? Otherwise, we’d all be dead, as we would have never been able to harvest anything ‘in time’ in the past. They did, and they did it without modern help! Yes, farms may have been smaller (although some were a lot bigger than a lot of modern farms, so I’m not sure why we keep harking back to that idea? but anyway….) but there was still the same amount of land overall.

[Nat(wasIxy)]

No I’m not just talking about grass farming, that’s just mostly what I do right now, I am talking about farming of anything really. Although we don’t have ranching and farming, it’s all just farming here!

What I don’t understand is why the model in Charley’s example wouldn’t work on 1000 acres, if the person who owned it could find enough people to work each little patch. To my mind, it makes no difference whether the person working the patch owns it or works for someone else who owns it – it is still the same land, same methods and same crops. We’ve gotten away from the sort of rural community where everybody owns their little slice and makes their living from it and I think that’s OK – some people like to turn up at work, earn their pay and go home and be with their family. I realise my 24/7 lifestyle isn’t for everyone.

[Nat(wasIxy)]

Sympathies about the drought – our land is usually exceptionally wet, and everything is adapted to that. Last year though it was dry, and we lost 3months of grazing (and stupidly sold our hay). So we ended up eating up ALL our reserves of silage, built up in the good years. Now this year has been even drier (after 2 exceptionally harsh winters, too), and the cattle are covering ground so fast that until it rained the other day we were worried we were going to have to bring them in again and start feeding bought in forage!

Fingers crossed for more rain as what we’ve had isn’t enough alone. But, we are looking at culling a good number, as this winter is going to be short on forage whatever happens. This is where lots of little animals really comes into it’s own though – you’re culling in little increments.

[Nat(wasIxy)]

@jac 25091 wrote:

Just heard yesterday that a neighbour of ours across the other side of the valley is giving up. 100 cow herds are deemed too small and the big milk buyer has said he will stop lifting his milk because he still has tie stalls !!! A more laid back herd of cows you would be hard pressed to find. These are among the last of the old fashioned kind of Ayrshire cows. Dont know how to turn the tide…
John

Don’t despair, it’s not all that way – OHs family history is all in dairy, but they all got out/are getting out due to the way things went. He’d like to get back to it, and I’ve always wanted to do it. We dismissed the idea thinking ‘no way it could work’…but then we started getting more enquiries about milk than meat. People seem literally desperate to get their hands on milk, if not raw then at least from a friendly local farm where they can see the cows. I think this is on the back of Nocton.

OF COURSE we are not set up to be selling milk to people yet, but based on sales of cat milk, we can now justify two cows. We believe the demand is certainly there, there’s people just waiting for the day we can sell them milk, with friends to recommend it to aswell, so we’re setting up a 12-cow dairy once we get back from honeymoon. We’re just hammering out the finer details now…

Mail order and the internet (which they didn’t have in The Old Days of course) certainly makes things easier for the customers, we don’t have to ask them to journey out to the middle of nowhere, they can sit on their sofa to find us and we can post them a regular supply of everything they want, right to their own front door!

[Nat(wasIxy)]

@dominiquer60 26910 wrote:

Well said Carl, things are always easier said than done.

I can see that if fuel gets to a certain price, keeping as much the same and merely substituting the engines for animals would cut a bill for you. That’s practical? It might not go far enough for some of us…but we don’t own those farms so what the hey?

Remember that some of do own farms where simple substitution of animals for engines will not allow us to yield the same results as we can with tractors. I can rake all day with animals and get what we need to done, but I can’t expect to accomplish what a 100 Hp tractor and a discbine can do in one morning with animals. We are only 5 people and we somehow are able to manage 300 acres of hay, small grains, corn and pasture. If we did not these fields would likely grow over and/or get developed. We few people could not do this with animals. If the land owners decided to buy a team and tend to their individual lands them selves and we dropped back to our 80 open acres, 4 of us driving teams would then be a manageable possibility if the desire was there.

Erika

That is your farm and your situation, somebody else might do the figures differently an work it out that it would benefit them in some way….maybe work in the manure production aswell (generating electricity to sell to the national grid rather than burning the petrol in tractors!????). I wouldn’t like to rule anything out, maybe because I get sick of being told that what I do every day is impossible…..

[Nat(wasIxy)]

@bivol 26919 wrote:

Carl and Ixy, right on target: WHY insist on huge farms?!

i mean, today we do have big farms, but it would all work better as far as draft animals are concerned if these huge farms would be chopped off into smaller sub-units, either as protected tenants, or sell it off to make smaller farms.

they wouldn’t even exists in modern huge sizes if it weren’t for modern machinery and chemicals, and that says something!

Erika, there’s an interesting thought: fuel prices and shifting back to animals isn’t always the most productive way to go, and yes, it DEPENDS ON THE SIZE of the plot! too much – animals wont be able to do the work it comfortable, too small – animals need a certain minimum on land, too. total market yield is smaller.
but for a right sized farm shift to animals power could work in favor of money!

so if one has a huuge farm – either chop it off in to managable pieces (and tent them), or sell the extra land and work what you can manage on family scale!
and family scale is important – todays culture and people are way too individualistic to join or live in some sort of farming commune as in middle ages… family sized farms suit our culture the best, IMO.
as for huge estates – they existed in europe and my scountry, to, but they were owned by nobility, and often the owners had no real interest in getting the maximum out of their land. they were content with rents, while some parts of the estate were not used. if huge farms would continue to exist in a post-fuel era, i’m afraid that any individual owning lots and lots of land, with lots of small tenant farms, would hold just too much power in his/hers hands… i’d opt for chopping up or protected tenant.

Again I don’t see why the farms would need to be tenanted? If my business warranted 1000acres, why would it be wrong for me to run 100 oxen and 10 teamsters to work it if I wanted to? I just don’t see why big is bad, just as I don’t see why small ‘won’t work’. That is why the ‘scale’ argument is a red herring to me – like I said, it’s far more important HOW we farm what we have than how big any one patch is – we’ll always start and end with the same amount of land.

[Nat(wasIxy)]

Carl,

Can’t get the quotes right but to reply to your post, yes it would be easy peasy for us to switch to draft power tomorrow. We’d sell the tractors and buy draft-appropriate machinery and get on. The ONLY reason we use tractors right now is because my brother in law is a tractor nut and he has the majority share in the farm! I don’t want to take away ALL his beloved tractorwork, and we’ve already taken most of it by mobstocking, because of that, all we really need to do is make 10acres of hay and a weeny bit of muckspreading sometimes. My brother in law does some contracting to get his tractor hours up, and I’m joining the British Horse Loggers to find my oxen some forestry work to get my ox-hours up! If only we could buy more land…

As for bringing about a cultural shift – I don’t want to, I only do what I do on my own farm and I think the customers will decide. Happily for the countryside, our meat sales have randomly boomed this spring, to the point where we’re going to be running out of animals to slaughter soon if it keeps up! Back to needing more land again….

[Nat(wasIxy)]

OldKat are you inlcuding the british in your ‘european’ there? As I think our ‘industry’ is just as split as yours – we look to your mobstockers for inspiration, breeding moderate sized cattle fit for purpose etc. As a result, our cattle are virtually worthless at market because everybody wants limousins/continental cattle which are truly enormous, lots of bone, and they like ’em FAT (at all times of year). Even though we abandoned our British breeds because they were ‘too fat’ and imported the continentals, which are lean…so you can imagine how much feed it takes to get them fat enough again…*sigh*

That’s why we sell direct. Customers don’t actually care despite what we get told about ‘what the housewife wants’, as long as it’s a good price and ethically produced.

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