This interesting article appeared some time ago in Rural Heritage: Economics of Farming with Horses.
Cotton farmer, 1937.
At the time it ran, I subscribed to the magazine, and I even wrote a few articles for it. None of mine dealt with this topic, however. Nor could they, as I'm not a farmer, and I wouldn't know how to use a horse in farming. Or a tractor, for that matter.
Unhitching horses, 1937.
The same topic, horse vs. petroleum economics, is being explored here on the SMH site, but with a different prospective.
Army freight wagon, 1940.
It's an interesting topic, and one that we usually don't consider in this fashion. The slow (and it was slow) switch from horses to petroleum horse power, was an economic decision more than anything else. There are other factors, but the "inevitable" march of progress type of prospective is wholly in error. Gasoline powered vehicles of all types were enormously expensive originally, and gasoline was as well, contrary to the popular concept that it was darned near free. Early on, gasoline was actually more expensive in real terms than it is now, and for that matter, so were automobiles. The switch away from horse was influenced by other factors in various areas, including convenience and easy maintenance in urban settings, but dollars and cents mattered more than any other factor.
U.S. Army recruiting poster from 1919, the year after the Allied victory in World War One.
Of course, once they came in, petroleum fueled farm equipment not only came in because of an economic tipping point, they changed the economics of everything as well. After awhile, all farmers nearly had to switch to them, or such was the perception. That impacted what they could farm, and then what they had to farm. The irony of mechanization is that in the end, it not only meant fewer farm horses, it meant many fewer farmers.
World War One vintage recruiting poster for the Indiana National Guard.
10 comments:
I've got a handful of farm ledgers that my great-grandmother and grandfather kept for the 'Home Place' that I'm farming right now.
I looked through them to try and figure out when they stopped using horses, and as near as I could tell, they were still using horses in 1937 (2 mares, 3 geldings, and 1 colt). The next ledger I have is my grandfather's from 1944, when it looked like he sold his last horse off the farm.
I don't know if it's true everywhere, but when they were still using horses, they were mainly growing corn, oats, and cotton. They were also growing a relatively small amount of wheat. Growing row crops like corn and cotton meant that there was a lot of work for the horses with cultivating all summer.
They had a small herd of dairy cattle and were selling cream. They also had chickens (layers and broilers), a few pigs, and surprisingly to me only a few beef cattle.
From the records of their income, the chickens (eggs and meat), pigs, and the cream was worth a lot more than the cattle. Because of that, I think they focused on growing the feed for the pigs, chickens, and horses.
My great-grandmother also had a lot of children, so there was a labor force to cultivate all those row crops, take care of all the livestock, etc. Those row crops were probably cultivated all summer long, so the horses and the kids were probably working almost year-round.
But, this land and it's weather wasn't really made for all that summer cultivation. So, after about 50 years of plowing and cultivation, I would guess that the organic matter in the soil was more or less gone, and the compaction was starting to get to be difficult to deal with with horse power.
After that long-winded explanation, I think there were a number of reasons that horses were replaced with tractors.
When compaction gets to be a problem, it would take a tractor to be able to pull something deep enough to deal with it.
Years of drought (made worse because of the low OM levels and compaction) made it hard to grow a decent crop of something like corn or cotton. Wheat is a little more forgiving to grow, so the farm probably slowly switched to growing wheat instead of corn or cotton. Wheat doesn't require cultivation to control weeds, so the horses weren't needed except for short periods of the year.
Eggs, cream, and chickens started to be a less profitable crop to grow, and beef started to more profitable, so the farm moved even farther away from corn and oats, and more towards wheat. Farm policies changed and cotton was phased out. All of that meant that horse were less and less suited to the type of farming that would be done in the future.
The kids all started to grow to adulthood, there were actually good-paying jobs available in town, so they stated moving away. When the kids move away, the labor force gets smaller.
So, people weren't forced to leave the farm because tractors replaced horses, a lot of people left the farms and the only way to cover the same number of acres was to get tractors.
To round out the story of the farm, I mainly grow wheat and cattle. I have a little help from family, but I can see how I might be on my own with all the work in the future and I'm starting to wondering how I'm going to adapt to being a one-man operation.
I may eventually end up with just cattle, grazing grass year-round like it was before the Land Run and any horse farming even started.
Extremely interesting post Rich. If you don't mind, I may come back and ask you a few questions on what you've related. Interesting stuff.
Ask away, I've got ledgers from 1937, 1944, and 1947 that are relatively detailed.
Most of the entries are about inventory (livestock, equipment, feed, etc.), values, selling prices, some crop yields, what type of livestock they owned.
I have a rough idea about how much land was actually being farmed at the various time periods, and I have to make an educated guess about some of the numbers, etc.
FWIW, I looked through the 1947 ledger, and it looked like Grandpa owned 3 horses (or mules) at the beginning of the year and none at the end of the year. I don't know if they were still using horses to farm with, were buying 'cheap' horses and then reselling them, or something else. I do know that he HATED horses, so he must have been trying to make some money from them in some sort of way (i.e. he wouldn't keep them around as pets).
I still find it hard to imagine raising chickens, sheep, dairy cattle, and pigs on the farm. And, it's hard to imagine growing very much corn, cotton, or mungbeans (I'm not even sure what a mungbean plant looks like).
One thing you've noted is that you're able to make a rough estimate how about how much land was under the plow.
Did that acreage change significantly after he want to tractors?
You mention soil compaction. One person I know who lives in Amish country told me that a problem that Amish farmers have is dealing with the soil compaction brought about by machinery, when they buy land from "English" farmers who have been using mechanized equipment. Your comment suggests that this problem may run the other way around as well.
In 1937, they were farming the same 320 acres that I'm farming. On that land, the cropland is exactly the same now as it was then (approx. 140 acres).
On other land that he eventually owned and farmed, the cropland acres have went down over the years. Most of that 'abandoned' cropland was small and/or hard to get to, 6 acres around one homestead, 9 acres on the other side of the the railroad tracks, a 15 acre field that was both hard to get to and wasn't very productive, etc.
I think a lot of those fields were there because the original homesteaders were desperate to make some money and tried to cultivate everything they could. Or, they were from places like Kentucky or Virginia, where farms were laid out like that.
You also have to throw in the fact that farming was also influenced by droughts in the 30's, 50's, and 80's, changing farm policies, and changing markets as much as moving from horses to tractors.
Soil compaction is partly caused by the type of implement you are using. A moldboard plow, a disc, and even a garden tiller shears the soil when it is used. That shearing results in what is called a 'plow pan', a compacted layer of soil formed at the depth of tillage with loose soil above it on the surface.
It doesn't matter if I am pulling a plow with a horse, a little tractor, or a gigantic tractor, it's the plow that will give me a compaction problem.
A tractor might cause some compaction problems if it is driven over a field when it's too muddy or the ground is saturated. But, saturated soil is a problem of poor drainage, poor drainage is caused by low water infiltration, which is caused by compaction layers and low organic matter levels, so we are back to problem being the plow and not necessarily the fault of the tractor.
Compaction and lower fertility are also a symptom of low organic matter levels. Low organic matter levels are usually caused by excessive tillage, and it doesn't matter if I am cultivating a corn field all summer-long with a team of horses or a tractor, it's still the excessive tillage that is causing the problems.
If I have a compaction problem from plowing and cultivating, I can use something like a tractor pulling a chisel plow to break through that layer of compaction (or pulling a moldboard plow much deeper). It takes a relatively high amount of horsepower to pull a chisel plow through a heavy compaction layer and I doubt if it could be done with horses.
That's one reason I think horses were phased out. And, I think the Amish are blaming tractors for compaction because they are looking for reasons to justify what they believe.
If I was making a suggestion to those Amish, I would tell them to chisel those fields as deep as they could, then I would start a combination no-till and cover-cropping system pulling a small no-till drill or planter with their horses.
I've been reading about some of the cover-cropping ideas of people like Gabe Brown and it seems like I've seen something similar somewhere.
"On other land that he eventually owned and farmed, the cropland acres have went down over the years. Most of that 'abandoned' cropland was small and/or hard to get to, 6 acres around one homestead, 9 acres on the other side of the the railroad tracks, a 15 acre field that was both hard to get to and wasn't very productive, etc."
Were those small isolated tracts or parts of the contiguous whole?
They were all part of the whole farm, most local farms are based on multiples of quarter sections (160 acres) with an occasional 80 acre piece of land. I'm lucky since I've got 400 acres all together (which is more or less what they had in 1937), instead of a few 160 acre farms spread out miles apart.
Almost every farm I've been on has areas that used to be cropland and that's pasture now. Most of it was abandoned a long time ago, and some of it went into something like CRP back in the '80's before going back into pasture.
"..Were those small isolated tracts or parts of the contiguous whole?.."
After thinking about it, I'm not sure I understood or answered this question right in my previous comment.
Those small tracts weren't originally parts of a bigger piece of cropland, but were small individual fields on other parts of the farm.
But, they were part of the whole farm and weren't isolated fields OFF the farm (which is what I thought you were asking in my first comment).
I note that you've referenced potentially going to all livestock.
Returning farmground to pasture is a long term trend that actually goes as far back as the 1930s. It seems to have picked up a bit in recent years, and I've read a few instances of that happening in this region in the last decade. We actually graze on some land that was once tilled, although not by us.
It really wouldn't be that big of a leap for me to move from growing wheat to a cattle-only operation.
Most of the wheat fields around here are usually grazed over the winter with either stockers or even just the cows (sometimes it's cheaper to graze wheat than buy hay and cubes).
If the wheat is planted early enough, and the right amount of rain comes at the right time, it's possible to wean the calves in October, put them on wheat pasture in November, and graze them until about March (100-120 days), and get 200-250 lbs. of gain per head. Usually, you can still harvest the wheat in June.
And, since I switched to no-till, I've reached the point that I also get a decent stand of volunteer crabgrass after I harvest the wheat. This summer, I was able to bale 3 bales of crabgrass hay per acre, then graze the field for a couple of weeks before I planted wheat again.
To go to a grazing only operation, all I would have to do is just stop drilling wheat, start grazing more cattle, and maybe bale hay once in a while. As a bonus, I could go back to planting wheat just as easy by spraying a burndown herbicide in the fall and drilling some wheat.
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