Replacing diesel tractors with horses or oxen – what will that be like?
Preface. Since fossil fuels are clearly finite, at some point increasing numbers of farmers with diesel vehicles and equipment will want to replace them with horses, which can do the work of six people. Here’s what energy expert Vaclav Smil has to say about that.
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Vaclav Smil. 2017. Energy and Civilization A History. MIT Press.
During the 1890s a dozen powerful American horses needed some 18 tonnes of oats and corn per year, about 80 times the total of food grain eaten by their master.
Only a few land-rich countries could provide so much feed. Feeding 12 horses would have required about 15 ha of farmland. An average U.S. farm had almost 60 ha of land in 1900, but only one-third of it was cropland. Clearly, even in the United States, only large grain growers could afford to keep a dozen or more working animals; the 1900 average was only three horses per farm.
Even in land-rich agricultures with extraordinary feed production capacities the substitution trend could not have continued much beyond the American achievements of the late 19th century. Heavy gang plows and combines took animal-drawn cultivation to its practical limit. Besides the burden of feeding large numbers of animals used for relatively short periods of field work, much labor had to go into stabling, cleaning, and shoeing the animals. Harnessing and guiding large horse teams were also logistical challenges. There was a clear need for a much more powerful prime mover—and it was soon introduced in the form of internal combustion engines.
The simplest way of transporting loads is to carry them. Where roads were absent people could often do better than animals: their weaker performance was often more than compensated for by flexibility in loading, unloading, moving on narrow paths, and scrambling uphill.
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