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

[bivol]

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.

[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)]

@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)]

@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…..

[bivol]

i dont mean to say farming 1000 acres with a 100 oxen wouldn’t be POSSIBLE, it’s just that it’s IMPRACTICAL!
i mean, ok, you will want to do it, and you will do it, noone doubts that. but will you be pleased or over-worked from working on such a huge farm? checking 10 different people, overseeing how they work, overseeing the care of animals, and then, planting all that, keeping the weeds under control, harvesting, and all. personally, i’d burn out.
and what about other people? tenant is easier whey you own this huge piece of land… that’s why it WAS used in the past (and present), with all its good and bad sides.

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.

personally, i’d farm a small or medium farm with oxen, ok, even a bigger farm (like with 16 oxen hitch they used in South Africa), but i wouldn’t venture anywhere NEAR farming a 1000 acres either alone or with help in a centralized manner a direct farming system (no tenants) requiers. just my 0,02 $.

about scale, animals themselves are the central issue in:

i see i explained myself wrongly; i dont think small scale itself wont work, i mean that small-ness has a minimal size when talking about draft animals, and that it’s not prudent to have draft animals on a plot under a certain acerage:
if you have a small plot, say 4 acres, you better farm with 1 or at most 2 draft cows, cause oxen or anything else aside from pure human muscle will eat the major share of what that small farm brings. scale isnt just about numbers, it’s also about fitting in the animals AND making a living off the land.

why farms need to be tenanted?
because it gives living space to more people. more people live on and off the land, and that’s a good thing.
also, because of social peace and integrity. if you were to be in a situation to seriously consider shifting your large-scale farming to ox-power, how would the rest of economy be likely to look? and would there be a place (in the economy) for this much people to be living in the cities? on what economic grounds? or wouldn’t it be better to enable them to go back back on the land and work it, and so solve the problem of employing and feeding them?

[CharlyBonifaz]

have seen “fields” in Madeira worked with 3 different crops at the same time; “fields” because their size would resemble -may be- a livingroom; no use for any tractors there: overhead there was wine, the soil was covered with vegetables and in between ran chicken or a tethered goat….as much hard labour as that is, I doubt one can get that big a harvest with anything mechanical….
so it depends not only on size either

[OldKat]

bivol, I think Ixy and you are using two different definitions for the word “farming”. Near as I can tell she is talking about grass farming; turning forages into protein through intensive grazing. She is probably not doing a whole lot of turning of the soil or much other intensive work that would require serious motive power, be it mechanical or animal generated. She is correct, using the model she is working with you could almost scale it up indefinitely without having to go to tractors and such since what she is doing is more closely related to ranching (in terms of activities she is engaged in) than to what you are calling farming; which would be plowing, disking, harrowing etc. If you think about it the massive herds of bison that roamed the plains of the US and Canada were doing essentially what she is doing, mob grazing a given piece of land and moving to fresh grazing. Think of the scale that those herds of up to a million head or more involved. Far as I know there weren’t any John Deere tractors following them around.

RE: why farms need to be tenanted?
because it gives living space to more people. more people live on and off the land, and that’s a good thing.
also, because of social peace and integrity. if you were to be in a situation to seriously consider shifting your large-scale farming to ox-power, how would the rest of economy be likely to look? and would there be a place (in the economy) for this much people to be living in the cities? on what economic grounds? or wouldn’t it be better to enable them to go back back on the land and work it, and so solve the problem of employing and feeding them?

bivol, do you think the average person living in the city would be able or even willing to work the land? My guess is most would prefer to stay right where they are and starve to death rather than move to a rural area and have to provide their own sustenance. In fact in the socialist redistribution schemes where this has been tried that is EXACTLY what has happened, most notably in Cambodia and in China. People were forced from the cities at gun point to form a rural socialist paradise and many, many starved in the process or were executed because them refused to participate. With all due respect I don’t think this is a viable solution.

[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)]

@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.

[jac]

There are a lot of really good social and agricultural points in this thread.. As OldKat pointed out, a lot of folks would sooner starve than go to be a farmer.
As each generation passes there are fewer and fewer people with the skill levels.. average age of a UK farmer is nearly 60 !!!! that doesnt bode well for the future.. 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.. tractors is deemed the only way but we know that in real terms a team will be more beneficial to a young couple starting out… Any time I talk about draft animals I ALWAYS say that nobody is suggesting we do away with tractors, the last thing I want is to alienate people from my point of view and if we try and make people think that big ag could be run using draft animals we will be doing our cause a great injustice.. better to slug away quietly and let the notion grow, that way as time passes mabey we will see bigger and bigger farming being tackled with draft animals… just my 2 shillings worth {inflation}:D
John

[Carl Russell]

Ixy;26952 wrote:

….
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. …..

This is the point. You say you don’t want to see a cultural change, but until there are people inclined to participate in this model, it is just a cerebral exercise.

And the question of scale in terms of area is not the point. As I have said, the question of scale is the degree of inputs and requirements. What is missing is an acceptance that in modern terms, right or wrong, the “large scale” of farming is tied to a set of methods, and not to the area, nor to the number of animals used.

I think we can agree on the point that to survive we need to feed our communities. It is a question of how many in each community contribute to that production. Right now we are all contributing by accepting the environmental and personal impacts of a system rife with problems.

It is easy to see a 1000 head mobstock operation using animal power. Now we are going to raise potatoes too, and other row groups presumably. How about some fruit orchards? Oh, and feed for the working livestock. To do this, especially with the landscape in the condition it is now, we will have to do to remedial work to infrastructure to facilitate that, requiring the moving of soil, stone, lumber etc.

Easy-peasy? No. Cultural change? Yes

And don’t get me wrong, I am right here ready to participate. I have close to thirty years under my belt working in this direction. The gaps in the landscape are filling in one young or novice teamster at a time. But I am still convinced that the discussion has to start at the small-scale and move toward larger.

Thanks, Carl

[mitchmaine]

carl,
your points are all good and strong. but i think you are missing one or might not just said it. the individual family farmers working on this cooperative all “might” lack a certain incentive derived from working on and deciding the direction of “your own place”.
i’ve seen it happen here on local intervale. hundreds acres of the best growing soil in maine leased to any who wish to grow there. farmers come and go, always opting for poorer heavy soils somewhere they can afford to own someday, so that all that work someday belongs to you.
the webbs put shelburn farm together out of thirty farms. almost 4000 acres with the most beautiful barns ever seen. hired the farmers they bought out to work it. it lasted 14 years with a millionaire footing the bills.
farmers are all artists in a sense. very creative business designing and building a farm. from the rockwalls to the orchards, all some outward statement of who you are. five painters all working on the same canvas. not gonna work.
mitch

[Rick Alger]

But back in the day, the small farmer or the small logger hired help. Often lots of it. Back then there was enough of a margin to allow a small timer to compensate workers fairly (for that time). That’s how many of us who are still trying to work animals learned what there was to learn. And that’s why we’ve hung on.

I like what the Prince of Wales said and would like to find a way to support the agenda he suggests. If I was compensated for what I do and don’t do to the environment logging with horses, I know I could keep a couple animal powered crews going full time and so could a lot of other folks.

Like Ixy said, what we need is more real work for ourselves and our animals. The culture will follow.

[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)]

@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!

[Author]

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