Oxen make the NY Times/Includes discussion of large scale animal-powered operations

[bivol]

Erika said one very fine word here: conveniency.

not to say working a big plot of farmland with draft animals (at least mules and horses) wouldn’t be possible, its just that these types of motive power are more convenient on smaller, family sized farms.
tractors are pretty much key-on/key-off. draft animals demand additional human labor around them – feed, brush, and or yoke 2 or four oxen – no problem! but feed, brush, yoke and clean after 20+ oxen? – umm, it’s a bit stretched! i’d opt for a john deere there. it’s not all in fuel prices – if working too many animals breaks me physically of work every day, i’ll opt for a machine.

as Carl said, monoculture is the problem.
it’ not even so much the size of farm itself – imagine you had a 500 acre farm, but with everything in it – farmlands with various crops, pastures, orchards, forests, fish ponds. then the chores would be more spread, time-wise, and draft animals would indeed be feasable, Ixy!

but in our current monoculture, they ain’t, for big farms!

Ixy, why do we need bigger farms? so the city-folk can have cheap produce, no matter what? i’ll break it down – if there are less people (and fuel) in the countryside to work in agriculture, then there is less food, food prices go up, and cities have less food. also land goes cheaper because the owner can’t work his entire huge plow and wants to sell the excess so he saves the rest when tax comes.
the re-emigration on the countryside takes place – it happened on Cuba! – and the incoming population boosts food production.
it’s balancing – and to me 80% of people living in cities is NOT a balance!

as for monks, there must have been great many monks (not to mention peasants!) working that land. you cant do that with a single family.

John, good thinking, a donkey engine would enable more efficient use of draft power! put in a Lister CS diesel, feed it waste cooking oil from a local restaurant, and that could reduce the need for animals when pulling say a harvester!

[CharlyBonifaz]

there must have been great many monks (not to mention peasants!) working that land. you cant do that with a single family.

very true, but it might be a thought in a culture with high unemployment rates….

[Nat(wasIxy)]

Yes the farm was owned by one distinct entity – the abbey. Many hands worked the land sure, but that is the same as the equivalent number of oxen or tractors or modernday employees.

It really doesn’t change how much one pair of oxen can do whether they are owned by the person working them, or one person/organisation owns many of them, therefore I still don’t see why the largest farms could not use them if they wanted to…yet still people repeat it?

[Nat(wasIxy)]

@bivol 26870 wrote:

as for monks, there must have been great many monks (not to mention peasants!) working that land. you cant do that with a single family.

Who says it has to be a single family without employees? Employment in rural areas is surely desirable. A single family could now perhaps work thousands of acres alone thanks to huge machinery – but it has to be paid for, continually, a LOT, and is there any real reason the money for that couldn’t go on oxen and wages for people to work them?

[Rick Alger]

Great topic.

For about 100 years the Brown Paper Company in NH managed with horses a forested “estate” the size of the state of Rhode Island. They harvested on average 600,000 cords of pulpwood a year and employed thousands of people.

[jac]

If governments shifted subsidy payments away from production or headage or a lot of the other “schemes” they come up with to “boost” agriculture into encouraging employment it would help the situation a lot. Present situation only encourages big ag..
John

[Nat(wasIxy)]

I think that is the idea…

[near horse]

Funny – I just heard a story yesterday about how modern US farmers are better able to cope with global climate change and the example they gave was due to increased moisture levels farmers have adapted by: 1) spraying for potential fungal issues related to the higher moisture levels and 2) buying/using Bigger (?) equipment so that they can get out into the wetter ground.

Sounds like great adaptations – for the chemical and equipment guys.

In my case, I fertilized last week using my horses and a forecart w/ a drop spreader. Definitely too soft for tractor and some spots for even a 4-wheeler but not for animal power.

[mitchmaine]

@near horse 26891 wrote:

Funny – I just heard a story yesterday about how modern US farmers are better able to cope with global climate change and the example they gave was due to increased moisture levels farmers have adapted by: 1) spraying for potential fungal issues related to the higher moisture levels and 2) buying/using Bigger (?) equipment so that they can get out into the wetter ground.

Sounds like great adaptations – for the chemical and equipment guys.

In my case, I fertilized last week using my horses and a forecart w/ a drop spreader. Definitely too soft for tractor and some spots for even a 4-wheeler but not for animal power.

hey geoff,
the bigger equipment they are talking about might have to be boats if this keeps up.
regards, mitch

[Nat(wasIxy)]

so you guys have all our water this year then? I’d appreciate it if you could send some back really…

[Carl Russell]

So back to the discussion for a moment.

I guess I still think it is important to understand the difference between farming on a large scale with animal-power, and large-scale farming with animal-power.

There is no doubt that animal-power can be used to cover huge tracts of productive land. It has been done, and will be done again.

However, when taken in the modern context, are we talking plowing hundreds of acres, planting corn, chopping corn and haylage, spreading liquid manure, to support mega-farms of industrial production?

And if so, why?:confused:

It really makes no sense on a large scale to simply import draft-animals for motive power when so much of modern farming is created around the use of the internal combustion motor, hydraulics, and power-take-off.

In this context, I think it entirely appropriate to make a distinction. In the current paradigm small-scale farming is the only reality for draft animal power.

If we are talking about rebuilding communities where many people work to support each other using personal skills and local natural resources to sustain an approach to the land on a landscape-scale, then YES, by all means lets promote that.

Just let’s be real, that in the minds of MOST modern human beings, this is a fairy-tale. Actually more of a falsehood.

We need to prove that animal-power can be successful on the small-scale in modern times before we can attract enough people who will be willing to work toward that lofty, and admittedly necessary, goal.

Carl

[Nat(wasIxy)]

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?

We use mobstocking, and that could (and has been) scaled up to thousands of cattle and sheep without getting any more ‘industrial’ than it is for our 60. If we had a thousand head of cattle, we would be a ‘big’ farm in the UK. We could easily use draft animals in that kind of a system to replace what little tractorwork we do.

‘Scale’ is a silly obsession I think, which is a neat distraction from other more pressing issue like HOW we are farming, however big or small the farm is. Like the notion we ‘need’ big farms to feed lots of people….it’s the same amount of land and the same things being grown, why does it all need to come from one organisation, why not many small ones? We won’t get any more or less food. That’s more of a business/logisticsy idea than a production issue.

[Carl Russell]

Ixy;26906 wrote:

…. If we had a thousand head of cattle, we would be a ‘big’ farm in the UK. We could easily use draft animals in that kind of a system to replace what little tractorwork we do.

Really? And you are sure of that?

It is very easy to say these things, much different to pull it off, day after day, for years and generations.

I agree that it can be done, but by you and what army? Philosophically it seems like a snap, but to do it we need a cultural shift, with enough folks to fill in the gaps.

If we keep saying “it can be done, it’s a snap”, then we will lose more than we will ever gain, because it really isn’t that easy…. and people know that.

‘Scale’ is a silly obsession I think, which is a neat distraction from other more pressing issue like HOW we are farming, however big or small the farm is. Like the notion we ‘need’ big farms to feed lots of people…

Which is exactly the point. In modern terminology “Farming” is “Big”. Anything less is not really farming (as far as the general public are concerned…readers of the NY Times). And “Big” “Farming” incorporates so much mechanical- and power-dependent processes that define its very existence that as we build the animal-powered future we must make the distinction. We SHOULD be considering Mob-Stocking, and other methods that are less energy-dependent for many reasons beside just the practical application of animal-power.

So by default, I think that mentioning that these methods are used at all, and that they are actually used to practical purposes on “Small Farms”, advances our cause by highlighting the use of animals, AND by illuminating the concept that there is such a thing as “Small Farming” in today’s culture, and that the people doing it take themselves seriously.

Carl

[dominiquer60]

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

[mitchmaine]

ixy,
i don’t know how you are using the word scale there? to me scale is very important. without the importance of scale, there is only big farming. small farming becomes a novelty and it isn’t. i don’t want any agent or tourist passing judgement on what i do here, and i’m guessing you don’t either. i say how big this farm is and how much i do and how many i employ. it’s that simple.

[Author]

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