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

[FELLMAN]

@Ixy 26964 wrote:

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!

I agree with that, a few years ago there was a huge amount of youngsters left farming for construction for two reasons one money and two time off both of these thing could be achieved to tempt them back and new youngsters in to ag all that needs to happen is a big improvement in profitability

[near horse]

One added positive to farming is “task variety”. Jobs change over the season – not common in many other vocations!

[dominiquer60]

good point Geoff, I know my body is thankful for the variety of work that farming provides, it is more forgiving than my night shift job where it is the same motion with my hands and shoulders all night long, yuck.

[bivol]

i’m sorry to chip in so late (again), but i have a few things to say bout city people going back to farming…

it’s about the notion that city folk would “rather starve to death” than pick the shovel up.

it’s not so.

why?
because i’ve heard of a few examples… our professor told us what he saw then he visited Romania back in 1993. that was 3-4 years after fall of communism he visited their capital city, and all around it (it was fall or eary spring) he saw old Dacia cars, parked right in middle of tended fields of black soil, about 100 meters apart, with entire families tending their plots. and mind that romania had, as any communist country, a large population of population in cities. OK, romanians were “better prepared” for disaster because they hung there for quite some time (and as in any communist country, people learn to get by and be resourceful), but nothing says our western city folk wouldn’t pick the tools up if there would be a REAL NEED; like their stomachs growling… oh, i believe they would, it’s only they and everybody else don’t believe they would, but believe me, if hunger comes, they’ll trade their cellphone for a shovel all right! they don’t need to go to the countryside, city has enough spaces… case: cuba.

but, it wont happen without a real NEED! that be a real chronic food shortage!

OldKat, distribution has nothing to do with ideology, in fact some of the most successful distribution was in GB during ww2.
as for communists, some most idiotic ideas of the 20th century were concieved by overly eager communists, but they were “special” both in mental depriveness and contact with reality…(cambodia: lol, they killed every intelectual they could: it was enough to wear glasses to be shot; Mao’s china: he starved more than were killeed in chinese civil war, plus he destroyed the 5000 y old culture china had – damn, Stalin would be envious!) i wouldnt even take these regimes into account in any serious debate… they deserve a FAIL sign seeable from the Moon.

on the other hand, probably the best example of a fast urban re-ruralization happened in a communist country: cuba. when food exports stopped, the city population began to plant and grow food in cities as well as repopulation the countryside. and i believe they unlike romainans were not so familiar, by large, with farming.
so, it ha nothing to do with someone’s ideology, it hasd more t o do with seriousness of the situation and the asic framework (legal, instructions, basic materials) the state can provide in case of food shortages… empty stomachs will provide the will to work.

[Oxbow Farm]

Its not remotely the same. A 1000 acres farmed with a tractor takes one or two big tractors and associated equipment and their operators and a bunch of diesel. A 1000 acres farmed with oxen takes many many teams and many many teamsters. But the biggest diffence is the fuel. The tractor acres are fueled with fossilized sunlight. The ox acres are fueled by current sunlight. So a significant percentage of the 1000 acres has to go to feed the teams and the teamsters. This production never hits the market. So animal traction can never be as productive as petroleum agriculture cause your “tractor” is eating the same fuel as you are. When agriculture switched to tractors all those acres of hay and oats were converted to market acreage. If we contemplate switching back then all those acres have to be switched back as well. But there are billions more people now than there were back then. That’s why they call it overshoot. Scares the crap out of me.

[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.

[goodcompanion]

@Oxbow Farm 27244 wrote:

Its not remotely the same. A 1000 acres farmed with a tractor takes one or two big tractors and associated equipment and their operators and a bunch of diesel. A 1000 acres farmed with oxen takes many many teams and many many teamsters. But the biggest diffence is the fuel. The tractor acres are fueled with fossilized sunlight. The ox acres are fueled by current sunlight. So a significant percentage of the 1000 acres has to go to feed the teams and the teamsters. This production never hits the market. So animal traction can never be as productive as petroleum agriculture cause your “tractor” is eating the same fuel as you are. When agriculture switched to tractors all those acres of hay and oats were converted to market acreage. If we contemplate switching back then all those acres have to be switched back as well. But there are billions more people now than there were back then. That’s why they call it overshoot. Scares the crap out of me.

Arithmatically, at the continued rate of population growth, there will be one human being per square meter of land area by 2500. We all know that’s not going to happen. Nor are people going to soberly look at the facts and think things over and decide that maybe there are just too many of us and we ought to stop having so many babies and give the rest of the planet a little more breathing room.

The rationalist hope that humanity will see the writing on the wall and get serious in confronting peak oil/global warming/nuclear proliferation/population explosion/leaky nuclear plants is probably doomed to disappointment. We humans can barely get together on a common agenda when times are good. When times are crappy we stick with our own and to hell with the next guy.

The thing I like about draft power is that it occupies a precious little scrap of ground between the rationalist belief in the power of human reason and empathy to solve all our problems and the hunker-down-and-wait-for-armageddon that seems to be a common response that people have (at least in my poor country) when faced with insurmountable systemic problems.

There is something to do.
It won’t solve everything.
It can restore some measure of balance.
But maybe not for everyone.

I guess I can live with that.

[Oxbow Farm]

Ixy, I am very cognizant of the fact that the tractor fuel will run out some day, maybe sooner rather than later. It’s one reason I am fooling around growing my own wheat and potatoes and cows and making ox yokes and shoveling manure and chopping wood. So that I know how to do so when it counts and can keep my kids fed.

My point is that there is no way to generate the same agricultural production using animal traction that is produced using conventional petroleum based methods. I am aware that conventional agriculture is unsustainable and that the entire system is rife with waste and inefficiency. I am pretty confident that the whole thing will fall apart and we’ll have to make do. I’m just saying I do not believe that we can just go “OK we’ll use oxen then tra-la-la!” The skills are mostly gone, the tools are mostly gone, the will to do the work is almost totally gone except for a small minority of weirdos like us on this forum. Making the transition in light of that will be agonizing. My choice is to try and prepare as best I can now to be able to help my family, friends, and neighbors when the time comes.

[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.

[goodcompanion]

@Ixy 27343 wrote:

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.

The reason the person with the large farm won’t try is not because others suggest that draft will not work on large farms. There are many, many factors preventing large landowners from making this transition. Some of these factors are clear from a review of large farms with animals through history.

Large animal powered holdings have existed in the past. The Roman latifundia is one example, and like the contemporary industrialized farm it produced primarily cash crops that were shipped off-farm. Another example is the big draft farms in the western US from the 1890s up until the beginning of the tractor era. This also produced a cash crop for the landowner, and in fact many of these landowners became quite rich.

As an alternate example, the medieval manor is also large and also uses animal power but this is really quite different from the above examples. It does not ship substantial amounts of product off-farm and does not produce cash for its lord, since a serf pays in kind. The beginnings of a cash system in the countryside in the 1500s paved the way for the destruction of the manor and these steady-state relationships. In the medieval manor, commerce over great distance is not generally possible, each manor being kind of like an economic island with limited dealings with the wider world.

So the better examples for what a farm like Ixy suggests are the latifundia and the big western farm. These operations are characterized by huge social stratification (a la Grapes of Wrath). They also take place in the context of complex societies where the landowner has the ability to ship crops great distances to urban markets for great profits. The workers are desperate enough for any kind of a situation to be a cog in this agricultural machine by choice. In the case of some of the latifundia laborers, and all the laborers on farms in the Old American South, they were simply slaves. In either case, the hallmark of the large animal-powered farm is extreme social stratification.

This is why the large animal farm can’t be realized. Present day farmers, even large ones, are so encumbered by capital and debt that they are in no position to take up economic dominance over a vast number of minions. The potential minions are not-so-willing, and also lack the skills, to submit to such a social and economic order.

Maybe the suggestion is that a nuclear family can manage 1000 head of oxen themselves without any help, easy-peasy, as it’s been suggested. I think it’s safe to say that the belief that managing many draft animals with few people on a large estate is easy and practical is a minority opinion, no less so amongst those who are in the field and know how much care and attention even a small operation and a small number of animals demands.

One other point. Ixy says, “size of the farm is a non-issue.” Size is always an issue. The greater the area the greater the distance from one place to another. Let’s say there are two farms that both rotationally graze stock and feed winter hay in a central barn, and one is 50 acres and one is 5000 acres.

Let’s focus on just the manure, and only the outbound trip with the spreader. We are going to spread 2 tons of manure to the acre, first on the 50 acre farm, then on the 5000 acre farm. On both farms, let’s say the barn is in the middle. On the 50 acre farm the average trip out is 400 feet (the farm is about 1400 feet on a side and is square). To spread 2 tons to the acre we must pull manure for a total of 7.5 ton-miles.

Now to the 5000 acre farm. The average trip out is 1.4 miles (this farm is a square three miles on a side). To spread the same 2 tons to the acre we must pull manure for a total of 14000 ton-miles.

On a larger farm you might employ a bigger spreader and more animals, but that only gets you so far. You are burning up 1866 times more energy simply moving manure around on the 5000 acre farm than on the 50 acre farm, even though the 5000 acre farm is only a hundred times bigger. Efficiency decreases exponentially with scale when it comes to getting material from A to B in small loads.

You could say, “but wait, we are going to have hay piles and manure piles in many different locations on this 5000 acre farm to decrease the travel distance.” I would agree that it would cut your energy loss in hauling. But what you are essentially doing when you decentralize your operation in this way is creating smaller farms within your larger farm which strengthens my point.

The reason we can get away with centralization on the contemporary large farm is because fossil fuel energy is used at every turn, for instance not just to move the gigantic liquid manure truck around, but also to fling the manure 60 feet to each side as it travels through the field. It is still colossally energy-wasteful but as long as energy is cheap this model will persist. Can’t pin that on the media.

[dominiquer60]

Great points Erik,

That was what I was getting at with our farm, only you were more articulate with your explanation. Our farm works 5 small farms with tractors, with only 4 potential teamsters and the long distances, we could never do what we do now with animals. If each land owner were to convert to animals and they returned to the original 5 farms, it would be completely doable, IF all parties were willing.

Although not all Amish are the same, I respect the general Amish ideal that farms should be of a size that is comfortable for one family to manage. If you look at all of the old farms around here that is exactly what the “norm” used to be. Today the small dairy industry has dried up and now most of the tillable acreage here in the north part of the county is run by 6 huge farms and a handful of remaining dairies that have less than 100 head.

The well know fact that small farms are the only group of farms that are actually increasing in number is hopefully a sign of the direction that we should be heading, back to the “norm.” The increasing number of small farms opens more opportunities for the increase of draft animal use because it is still viable at this scale even in our “get big or get out” economic times. If this is all we have at the moment it is better than tractor dealers buying horses for meat, so lets be happy for the slow change and do our part to make more change in this direction possible.

The only increase in draft power that I am looking forward to on our farm, at the moment, is watching these steers grow like weeds out on pasture, so I had better go get them turned out this morning.

Erika

[goodcompanion]

Oops, just rechecking my math here. The 5000 acre farm is actually 2.8 miles on a side, average trip out loaded 1.1 miles long, for a total of 11,000 ton-miles. Not 14,000. So If there were a hundred fifty acre farms they would haul manure a total of 750 ton-miles combined. So you could say that the large farm wastes 14.6 times more energy hauling manure than a hundred small ones for this particular operation. In case anyone cares.

[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.

[goodcompanion]

@Ixy 27376 wrote:

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.

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.

[Andy Carson]

@goodcompanion 27309 wrote:

There is something to do.
It won’t solve everything.
It can restore some measure of balance.
But maybe not for everyone.

I guess I can live with that.

I just wanted to say what a profound and poetic set of statements this is. Having the freedom to live as you want and be able to shepherd your land by your own ideals is so incrediably appealing. It’s hard to imagine how one would achieve this level of satisfaction long term if working to achieve someone elses vision. Just like Erik indicated, once the “help” is trained, they are likely to leave and start thier own farm. Good thing too, if you ask me. So, we come back to that amount of land a family can opperate without much outside help. With animal power, it’s hard to imagine how that amount of land could possibly be 5000 acres.

[Author]

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