Farming with Horses

By | MRS. GOSSIPY GOAT | On a cool spring morning in a field somewhere in Pennsylvania, Ohio, or Indiana, you can still hear a sound that was once the background music of human civilization: the jingle of harness, the soft huff of a big animal leaning into its collar, and the low voice of a farmer saying “Step up.” There is no diesel rumble and no exhaust. The soil turns over in a ribbon behind the plow, and the steam rising from the horses’ backs mixes with the smell of fresh earth. For most of agricultural history, this was simply what farming looked like. Today it is an anachronism to some and a quiet revolution to others. The story begins not with horses but with cattle. The earliest plows, pulled by oxen, appeared in Mesopotamia and the Nile Valley several thousand years ago, and oxen remained the dominant farm power across much of the world for millennia. They were strong, patient, and cheap to keep, and at the end of their working lives they could be eaten. Horses, by contrast, were first prized for speed. They pulled chariots and carried warriors, and for a long stretch of history they were a luxury of kings and cavalry rather than a tool of the common farmer. The reason is surprisingly mechanical. Early harnesses used a throat-and-girth design that circled the horse’s neck, and when the animal pulled hard, the strap pressed against its windpipe. A horse so harnessed could not use its full strength without choking itself. The solution was the padded rigid collar, which rests on the shoulders and lets the animal push its entire body weight into the load. Versions of it appear in China around the fifth century and spread westward, reaching Europe by roughly the ninth or tenth century. Add the iron horseshoe, which protected hooves on hard and wet ground, and the horse suddenly became a serious farm laborer. Horses and mules with shoes can move and groove in most weather conditions, that requires traction like plowing and harvesting. However, their shoes must fit well to reduce injury and most likely have cleats to reduce slipping in wet weather; provide comfort on hard soil and rocks.

Medieval Europe gradually shifted toward horses, especially in regions with good grain and oats to feed them. A horse works faster than an ox, covering more ground in a day, and speed matters enormously when the weather window for planting or harvest is short. Selective breeding followed. Large, heavy-boned animals descended from medieval warhorses became the ancestors of the great draft breeds we know today. By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, improved plows, seed drills, mowers, and reapers all assumed a team of horses standing at the front. Farm machinery was designed around the horse for generations, which is why so many antique implements have a tongue or hitch built to accommodate animals. While horses carried the glory, the mule carried an astonishing amount of the actual work, particularly in warm climates. A mule is the offspring of a male donkey, called a jack, and a female horse, called a mare. (The reverse cross, a stallion and a female donkey, produces a hinny, which is rarer and generally smaller.) Mules are almost always sterile, so every one must be deliberately bred, a fact that made them a specialty product of skilled breeders. In America, the mule’s champion was none other than George Washington. After the Revolution, he became fascinated by the idea of mules as farm animals and campaigned to import quality jacks from Spain. In 1785, the King of Spain sent him a prized jack that Washington named Royal Gift, and the animal went on to sire a generation of Virginia mules. Washington’s enthusiasm was practical. He saw that mules ate less than horses, tolerated heat and hard use, and were less prone to many of the illnesses that plagued fine horses. Over the nineteenth century, mules became inseparable from Southern agriculture. They worked cotton, sugarcane, and tobacco fields. They hauled barges along canals and pulled artillery and supply wagons for armies. When Reconstruction-era promises of “forty acres and a mule” echoed through the South, the mule was shorthand for the means of independent farming life itself.

Missouri became the great mule-breeding center of the country, and the animals were shipped by the thousands to farms across the cotton belt. The peak came in the early twentieth century. Estimates suggest that American farms held something like twenty-five million horses and mules around the time of the First World War, a remarkable figure when you consider that a sizable fraction of the nation’s cropland was devoted to feeding them. Oats, hay, and pasture fueled the entire system, and a farmer was, in effect, running two enterprises: one for the market, and one to feed his own engines. Not every horse is built to pull a plow. A saddle horse or a racing Thoroughbred has the wrong frame, the wrong temperament, and the wrong kind of stamina. A true farm horse needs weight, a broad chest, powerful hindquarters, and sturdy legs, along with something harder to measure: a calm mind. A plowing horse must stay steady when a hawk bursts from the grass, when a machine rattles behind it, or when its teammate gets nervous. Several breeds have earned their reputations in the field. The Belgian is the heavyweight champion of American draft horses, typically standing 16 to 17 hands and weighing 1,800 to 2,200 pounds. Belgians are known for willing, mild dispositions and tremendous pulling power, and they remain the most numerous draft breed in the United States. The Percheron, originally from the Perche region of France, is slightly more refined, often gray or black, with an elegant head and an energetic, long-striding walk that makes it popular for both farm work and show. The Clydesdale from Scotland, with its feathered legs and flashy white markings, is better known as a parade horse today but was bred to haul heavy loads. The Shire is England’s colossal contribution, the tallest of the draft breeds, and the Suffolk Punch, a stocky chestnut, was developed specifically for East Anglian farm work and has a reputation for easy keeping and endurance. These breeds provide the raw horse power for most farmers to make a living and reduce the wear and tear on their bodies.

For small farms and mixed duties, many farmers prefer a slightly lighter draft type or a cross, because a 2,000-pound horse needs a lot of feed and can be more animal than a small operation requires. Conformation matters more than pedigree. A good work horse has a short, strong back, a deep girth, well-sloped shoulders for the collar to sit on, and clean, hard hooves. Soundness is everything, because an animal that cannot stay sound cannot earn its keep. Mules offer a different set of virtues. They are famous for their stamina and heat tolerance, which is why they dominated the South. They tend to be more sure-footed than horses, and they have a strong sense of self-preservation that people mistake for stubbornness. A horse may work itself to collapse if asked, but a mule will stop when it judges that continuing is unsafe or unreasonable. Farmers learned that this was not obstinacy but intelligence, and that a mule treated fairly would work all day without complaint. Mules also tend to be hardier about feed quality and are less prone to colic and founder than horses. The best draft mules come from crossing a large draft-type mare with a big jack, often a Mammoth jack, a breed of exceptionally large donkey developed in the United States. A Belgian or Percheron mare bred to a Mammoth jack can produce a mule of 15 to 16 hands with real pulling strength, combining the horse’s bulk with the donkey’s toughness. Smaller mules from lighter mares were the standard “cotton mules” of the South, while heavier “sugar mules” were bred for hauling cane through the thick, wet fields of Louisiana. A Southern farmer shopping for a mule thought as carefully about its parentage and size as a modern farmer thinks about tractor horsepower. If animals were so well suited to the farm, why did they disappear? The answer is a story of economics, engineering, and ambition. Steam-powered traction engines existed in the nineteenth century, but they were enormous, expensive, and best suited to the big wheat fields of the prairie. Although, through cooperatives the steam-powered equipment would be shared.

The real shift came when the internal combustion engine shrank enough to be practical. Henry Ford’s Fordson tractor, introduced in 1917, was cheap and mass-produced, and it brought mechanical power within reach of ordinary farmers. Then, in 1924, International Harvester launched the Farmall, a row-crop tractor that could do the cultivating work horses had always done between planted rows. That was the decisive moment, because it removed the last major job that animals did better. The advantages of tractors were genuine. A tractor does not tire in the afternoon heat. It can pull multiple bottoms of a plow at once, so a single operator can till vastly more land in a day. It needs no feeding when idle, while a horse eats whether it is plowing or standing in the barn. And the tractor liberated enormous acreages that had been devoted to growing animal feed, putting that land into crops that could be sold. By the 1950s, horses and mules had largely vanished from American commercial agriculture, and the population had fallen to a small fraction of its peak. The same story played out, on varying timelines, across the industrialized world. On a purely mechanical basis, no. A modern tractor outpaces a team by an order of magnitude, and a farmer cultivating thousands of acres of corn or wheat cannot do it behind horses. A horse can sustain a pull of roughly a tenth of its body weight over a working day, and at a walking pace of two to three miles per hour, the acreage adds up slowly. A man with a single-bottom walking plow and a team might turn an acre or two in a day, and even with a larger riding implement and a multi-horse hitch, the numbers pale beside a modern machine. Horses also need rest, they get injured, and a team takes years to train and bring to full strength. Yet the question of “competing” depends on what you are measuring. If you count only acres per hour, horses lose. If you count cost, soil, and independence, the picture is more interesting. Consider the economics of a small diversified farm of, say, thirty or forty acres, horse and mule power becomes very economical.