Thinking seriously about starting with oxen…

[goodcompanion]

Hi folks,

This year we did a pilot project of wet rice on my farm. Really excited about the results–we got a return on our seed investment of 500 to one by weight–and thinking expansion!

One of the steps usually performed in rice growing is a kind of plowing/harrowing in 6″-1′ of standing water. Called “puddling.” Right now I farm with horses and while great for haying and cultivating dryland crops, (and maybe even pulling the reaper-binder for the rice someday), there’s no way they will “puddle.”

Another issue is that while a team of horses is sufficient power for almost all jobs on this farm, I cannot pull a plow in this clay with two for more than an hour or two at best, and that with lots of rests. One old timer says that it takes four to go all day. I don’t want to have four horses. Except for plowing, pretty much, I wouldn’t have enough work for them all.

Bur maybe two horses and two oxen? What is the comparative draft of your average 1600 lb draft horse versus your average ox? And anybody play around with oxen in water like I’m describing?

On the other hand it’s taken me five years and a lot of punishment to achieve the modest competency I now have with drafts. I feel a little uneasy about a whole new learning curve. Just how different is it? Anyone else made the switch?

[Carl Russell]

After about 7 years of learning to work with horses, I started a pair of Holsteins. I found it to be very comparable.

The differences are really about the way you move, and the species-specific variations. Plowing is a really good task for cattle. If you get Holsteins they will grow fast (working sooner) and you will have a team weighing about 5000 lbs. They will do a lot of work.

I have a pair of Normandes (4000 #) right now that I started as calves and keep wondering when I will get time to work them. 4 animals is 4 animals no matter how you look at it, and it is hard to find the time to work with them.

Carl

[jac]

Found this site the other day.. seems pretty detailed but given that I know diddly squat bout training oxen I will leave it to the oxen folks on here to comment… http://www.prairieoxdrovers.com …
John

[dominiquer60]

I have never owned a horse but I have worked with and enjoyed them for 25 years, including training young drafts to drive at college. If you have told me 25 months ago that I would own a pair of cattle before I even seriously considered a team of horses I would have told you that you were crazy. Yet here I stand now with the Ox bug and 2 teams of young cattle at my home.

I don’t think that I lost the horse bug, but cattle just fit into my life and the farm that I live on better than horses would at the moment. Training is similar in some ways, but I find cattle better suited to my personality than horses, they seem to me less over reactive to their environment too.

Thats just my 2 cents,

Erika

[OldKat]

@goodcompanion 21212 wrote:

Hi folks,

This year we did a pilot project of wet rice on my farm. Really excited about the results–we got a return on our seed investment of 500 to one by weight–and thinking expansion!

One of the steps usually performed in rice growing is a kind of plowing/harrowing in 6″-1′ of standing water. Called “puddling.” Right now I farm with horses and while great for haying and cultivating dryland crops, (and maybe even pulling the reaper-binder for the rice someday), there’s no way they will “puddle.”

Another issue is that while a team of horses is sufficient power for almost all jobs on this farm, I cannot pull a plow in this clay with two for more than an hour or two at best, and that with lots of rests. One old timer says that it takes four to go all day. I don’t want to have four horses. Except for plowing, pretty much, I wouldn’t have enough work for them all.

Bur maybe two horses and two oxen? What is the comparative draft of your average 1600 lb draft horse versus your average ox? And anybody play around with oxen in water like I’m describing?

On the other hand it’s taken me five years and a lot of punishment to achieve the modest competency I now have with drafts. I feel a little uneasy about a whole new learning curve. Just how different is it? Anyone else made the switch?

Wow, I had no idea rice would grow that far north. I suspect that you only will get one cutting rather than a first mid-summer and a bonus cut in the fall? Right? Be ready for geese to invade your fallow rice field if you are on a flyway. We use to have as many as 20,000 to 30,000 feeding on the fields behind our house. I miss those days.

The area where I grew up use to be a major rice producing area, and has been lost to suburban sprawl in the past 20 to 30 years. But I heard that the oldtimers used herds of cattle that they would drive back and forth in flooded fields to “puddle” the ground. I think this was in preparation of seeding, but I don’t know for sure.

Are you actually growing your rice in flooded fields or are you growing it dry land?

[bivol]

well, cattle are used extensively in the far east for plowing flooded fields. in fact, i think loosening the soil by flooding was one of the main reasons that a single animal could be used.

from little i know, i think that, going from the soil type, the field should either be plowed while being soaked (for lighter soils), or left to soak a while (week?), and then plow it (for clay).

in the picture the water buffalo makes short work of a clay field because it’s softer when soaked.

horses were used for harrowing some paddies, but they were ponies, and honestly i don’t know how their hooves would take being soaked all day. they are too expensive (and need a long time to heal) should something go wrong.

sometimes there are holes in the field, and if an ox stumbles, no big deal, but if a horse stumbles, it might get a trauma and will not want to plow anymore. that’s probably one reason why horses were led while pulling in paddies.

traditionally for the job of plowing paddy fields oxen and water buffalo were used.
oxen are very good for this job, esp. for puddling, since some research has shown that fields puddled by cattle retain more water or improve drainage. not sure here, but it was definitely mentioned in a positive way.

one ox is enough to plow paddies of flooded clay soil in china. but, here “enough” means for their smaller paddies. for larger ones you might well need two oxen, although i wouldn’t know for sure. water loosens up the clay and one stronger ox might well tear it up in no time.

now, for oxen: i’d recommend em medium sized with DARK hooves. lighter hooves will get way softer in water than dark ones.
cross-breds too, cause the cattle have to be nimble enough.
and if the fields are gonna be plowed while flooded, no need for huge oxen that eat too much, and that go fat fast. since you’re going to be using them for plowing and harrowing, it’s important that they don’t eat the budget and don’t put on fat too much, so maybe a diary, or diary cross.

jersey-cross maybe?…

some videos. many in the videos are buffaloes, but common oxen can do good as well. thousands of years of practice in plowing flooded fields in China, Japan, and Korea have proved it.

about speed: water buffalo on clay soil. clay is way easier to plow when soaked.

harrowing

on clay soil

also, there was a method, i think, called rice-duck-fish. it’s an integrated system where ducklings and small fish are introduced in paddies once the rice stalks are at a certain age.
if the ducks grow up along rice, they won’t try to eat it (at least from what i red). instead they concentrate on slugs, snails, and other vermin. they fertilize the field, and are ready for slaughter at the time the fields are dried.
fish (talpia i think) are also released in the field and eat agae and stuff, grow up till the fields are drained.
this system was used in china and japan.

heads up anyway…

[goodcompanion]

@bivol 21231 wrote:

also, there was a method, i think, called rice-duck-fish. it’s an integrated system where ducklings and small fish are introduced in paddies once the rice stalks are at a certain age.
if the ducks grow up along rice, they won’t try to eat it (at least from what i red). instead they concentrate on slugs, snails, and other vermin. they fertilize the field, and are ready for slaughter at the time the fields are dried.
fish (talpia i think) are also released in the field and eat agae and stuff, grow up till the fields are drained.
this system was used in china and japan.

heads up anyway…

Ah, well, that’s exactly what I’m going to try and do here. Maybe minus the fish, we’ll see. Takuro Furano, the author of the main English book in that integrated system, also uses grown ducks to agitate the soil for the “puddling” step in place of tractors or draft animals. That has potential too!

[goodcompanion]

@OldKat 21229 wrote:

Wow, I had no idea rice would grow that far north. I suspect that you only will get one cutting rather than a first mid-summer and a bonus cut in the fall? Right? Be ready for geese to invade your fallow rice field if you are on a flyway. We use to have as many as 20,000 to 30,000 feeding on the fields behind our house. I miss those days.

The area where I grew up use to be a major rice producing area, and has been lost to suburban sprawl in the past 20 to 30 years. But I heard that the oldtimers used herds of cattle that they would drive back and forth in flooded fields to “puddle” the ground. I think this was in preparation of seeding, but I don’t know for sure.

Are you actually growing your rice in flooded fields or are you growing it dry land?

In this climate the rice is started in a greenhouse in April, transplanted into standing water in the paddy in mid-May, and harvested in September. This is pretty much the same schedule as is used in northern Japan. This type of rice can’t be grown dryland to good effect.

I actually visited a bunch of rice farms in northern Japan when I lived there 10 years ago but I wasn’t paying that much attention. Never occurred to me that I’d develop an interest in growing such crops.

The cultivars I am using are cool-temperature-tolerant short grain brown sticky rice. We grew 23 lbs this year. Next year going for 500! We made a little huller out of a corona crank mill and it worked okay. We had a little with dinner and it was fine.

I would bet that the feet of the ox alone would provide pretty good puddling action.

[Andy Carson]

Erik,
This is a fascinating project and I’m excited to hear how it goes. Are you thinking about starting calves or getting an older pair? I see ads from time to time (on this site and others) for more mature teams with some training being sold at very reasonable prices. I have noticed that most of the oxen people on this site start their own. I don’t know much about oxen, really, but it seems like such a long time to wait until they get big… I have never had the patience to wait for a horse to mature, at least. Perhaps there is a practical reason that so many oxen people start with calves?

[goodcompanion]

@Countymouse 21235 wrote:

Perhaps there is a practical reason that so many oxen people start with calves?

Very good question, I’ve wondered this myself. Any takers?

[Rod]

There are a lot of very well trained 4H steers available in New England and at good prices considering the time and feed it takes to get a team ready. Since it’s about 3 years to get a team of oxen big enough to do heavy work I would think that would be a deciding factor if you want to get started sooner rather than later.

[Joshua Kingsley]

Erik,
Being as where you live is not real far from liester i would go look at the team of jersey steers that is available there. it will cost more than the 850 they are asking to grow out a team and train them not to mention the time or expense of yokes. It may be an oppertunity to look at a team and see if they will work for what you want.
Joshua

[dominiquer60]

I started my first team of cattle at 6 months because it was what I had available to me at the time for no cost, and I wanted to see if it would really be something that I could do well enough and enjoy. So I did well enough and really enjoyed the process, the first team is not really mine and they will probably be sold in the spring. I picked up a pair of Durham bull calves yesterday with the hope of them becoming my farm team for years to come.

I enjoy raising them from calves, developing a relationship with them and taking them through the steps of training. If I needed Ox power I might just buy a started pair of older steers, but seeing as we have 16 tractors and 3 men that love using and working on them, there is no urgent need for Ox power on our farm. So I can take my time and give the young cattle odd and size appropriate jobs as they surface.

The nice thing about cattle over horses is that they can be worked younger, an 8 month old pair of calves can haul their own manure every day, a 14 month old pair can be used to get firewood. An 8month old horse is halter broke and desensitized to a few things, a 14 month old horse may be broke to carry a harness and perhaps ground driven at the most. By the time cattle are ready for heavy work they have already had a ton of work experience and have had a lot of kinks worked out already. I would imagine that buying an older team, like buying a team of horses, would take some time for all to get used to each other and create a new human/animal working relationship.

I enjoy may cattle, they are not better or worse, just different than horses and what works for me. Good luck if you do get a team of cattle, they can be very pleasurable animals to work with.

Erika

[Andy Carson]

I will second Joshua’s point. I while ago, I spent alot of time thinking about and researching donkey’s, and could list lots of reasons why I thought they would be perfect for several jobs I have. When it came time to buy one, however, we just never “clicked.” I don’t mean this to be a criticism of donkies, but I think it would have been wiser if I had met some first, then invested time in figuring out how they could contribute on the farm, rather than the other way around… Have you spent much time around oxen already?

[bivol]

@goodcompanion 21232 wrote:

Ah, well, that’s exactly what I’m going to try and do here. Maybe minus the fish, we’ll see. Takuro Furano, the author of the main English book in that integrated system, also uses grown ducks to agitate the soil for the “puddling” step in place of tractors or draft animals. That has potential too!

ducks puddling? will have to check in on that… i don’t know about that, i don’t see how a few pounds worth of duck could puddle a field (mix the soil by it’s weight) as a cow or ox…
IF puddling is what i think it is, mixing moist mud and soil in the paddy.

fish are probably out, since talpia are used, and they like warm climate…

so can you tell me the mane of the book? i’ve been looking up the author, but so far nothing.

and speaking of alternative japanese agriculture, have you red One-straw revolution? it’s very inspiring.

[Author]

Posts