Farmer going back to horse and plough

[DominicJ]

CLV
The horse needs 25,000 calories a day, even though it cant plough every day.
The tractor needs 71,000,000 calories a field.

Not entirely sure where work rate is going to be honest.
Nor am I sure it takes 10L of fuel to plough a field...

[vtsnowedin]

Yes but the horse has to be fed and cared for every day of the year not just the days you have work for it. The tractor can just be parked in the shed using no fuel until you have work for it.

Isn't that accounted for in the 30/1 work rate?

Ziggy's figures not mine but I think not. A midsized tractor pulling double bottom plows might move at two miles per hour plowing four feet wide and net an acre per hour. His ten liters fuel consumption sounds reasonable but any such computation would have to be equipment specific. A team of horses would take all of a ten hour day to do as much and you would have to pay the plowman for the whole day. His labor saved by using the tractor more then pays for the fuel and will even at much higher prices.

[ziggy12345]

My post was to highlight the low cost of energy. Although it takes far more energy to use a tractor to do the same amount of work as a horse its actuallly cheaper in money terms.

[UndercoverElephant]

My post was to highlight the low cost of energy. Although it takes far more energy to use a tractor to do the same amount of work as a horse its actuallly cheaper in money terms.

Yeah, we need two definitions of "efficient". Efficient in terms of money, or efficient in terms of the most effective use of the available natural resources? A lot of people tend assume these are the same thing, but they most certainly are not.

[JavaScriptDonkey]

My post was to highlight the low cost of energy. Although it takes far more energy to use a tractor to do the same amount of work as a horse its actuallly cheaper in money terms.

Only if you assume you have to buy fuel but don't have to either pay a ploughman or have anything else constructive to do in the time you've spent not staring at a horse's arse.

And a good tractor could last 50 years. How many horses is that?

[biffvernon]

Only 50 years? Horses have already lasted a few million years, periodically renewing themselves.

[ndon]

Only 50 years? Horses have already lasted a few million years, periodically renewing themselves.

as John Seymour said, tractors don't heal or reproduce.

It also strikes me that if you are spending 30 times longer ploughing with a horse, then what it is doing on the "off" days in immaterial, as there will be few of them.

[ziggy12345]

CLV
The horse needs 25,000 calories a day, even though it cant plough every day.
The tractor needs 71,000,000 calories a field.

Not entirely sure where work rate is going to be honest.
Nor am I sure it takes 10L of fuel to plough a field...

Horses use only 15,000 when not ploughing but thats not the point. Also I made a mistake converting Joules to Calories. It should be 4,000,000

Work rate is important as you can do 30 times more work with a tractor at around 3000 times the cost in energy terms or the same price in money terms

[vtsnowedin]

Only 50 years? Horses have already lasted a few million years, periodically renewing themselves.

as John Seymour said, tractors don't heal or reproduce.

It also strikes me that if you are spending 30 times longer ploughing with a horse, then what it is doing on the "off" days in immaterial, as there will be few of them.

At least one a week as your not going to get your plowman to work on Sunday after plowing for six days straight, religious or not. Then there is winter, about a hundred and twenty days where the only useful thing you can do with the team is skid logs. And after you get things plowed harrowed and planted you have to devote a few weeks to cutting and putting up the hay to feed the horses not to mention the land you have to devote to that hay and their pasture plus they would like a bit of that grain your raising on that plowed ground in their feed bag especially when they are working.

[rue_d_etropal]

Seem to remember reading somewhere that horses are not a particularly efficient animal to use. Oxen are much better suited to do this type of work.

[vtsnowedin]

Seem to remember reading somewhere that horses are not a particularly efficient animal to use. Oxen are much better suited to do this type of work.

Umm No. The horse can pull into a horse collar much harder then an ox can pull into a yoke. Also horses are fast enough to pull ground driven machines such as mowers and manure spreaders which need a minimum speed to operate properly. When tractors came in they replaced horses not oxen.

[DominicJ]

VT
But that proves horses are more time efficient, not energy efficient.

[paul1963]

Hmmm, new to powerswitch and this will be my first post. It is an interesting thread but............

The traditional definition of an acre is the amount of land a man and a horse can plough in a day.

I don't know about the "facts" or "figures" that have been quoted but I do know that it didn't take long for tractors to take over from horses, and there must have been a sound reason for that, after all tractors were (and still are) very expensive machines.

Is the bigger issue that within a comparatively short timescale we will be unable to feed the planet's population (rapidly approaching 7 billion) and any reduction in farming efficiency would move away from that need?

[vtsnowedin]

VT
But that proves horses are more time efficient, not energy efficient.

AHH but time is of the essence when it comes to spring planting. The window for seeding is only a couple of weeks long and anything plowed a long time before as in the previous fall needs to be redisked at least to kill the weeds that have started up.
The calories needed to pull the plow through the sod will be the same for horses and oxen and I doubt that their digestive systems are markedly more efficient at least not to the point where a yoke of oxen needs less land to feed it then the team of horses.
Paul1963 Welcome You'll find and interesting and diverse group here.
I believe that the traditional definition of an acre goes back to ancient Egypt and was the amount of land a yoke of oxen could plow in a day as they are seldom worked single. The Egyptians invented land surveying ,by the way, as a way to restore property lines after the frequent flooding of the Nile delta.

[UndercoverElephant]

Hmmm, new to powerswitch and this will be my first post. It is an interesting thread but............

The traditional definition of an acre is the amount of land a man and a horse can plough in a day.

I don't know about the "facts" or "figures" that have been quoted but I do know that it didn't take long for tractors to take over from horses, and there must have been a sound reason for that, after all tractors were (and still are) very expensive machines.

Is the bigger issue that within a comparatively short timescale we will be unable to feed the planet's population (rapidly approaching 7 billion) and any reduction in farming efficiency would move away from that need?

What does "farming efficiency" mean?

(a) Producing food as inexpensively as possible?
(b) Producing as much food as it is possible to produce from one acre?
(c) Producing as much food as possible for a given amount of natural resources?

(a) depends on cheap oil, fully industrialised farming and vast monocultures.
(b) depends on cheap oil, but not neccesarily industrialised farming and monocultures.
(c) can only be achieved with non-industrialised organic permaculture. This food is considerably more expensive and requires a lot of human effort, perhaps with some help from animals, but it makes far better use of the available resources and preserves the state of the land without the need to continually add oil-based fertilisers.

The only way I can see that we would have any hope of feeding 7 billion people in the future is if industrialised farming is replaced with permaculture. This would also solve the world's unemployment problem. Is it actually going to happen? No, of course not, because almost nobody wants to go back to working the land (by hand) and almost nobody wants to pay considerably more for their food. What is actually going to happen is that industrialised farming will continue for the benefit of the rich, and the poor will starve.