Tractors, Tillage, and Horses — Peter Garnham
Constant Harvest • Volume 4 Number 2 • Autumn 2005 Updated: 04/10/06
Just as a carpenter’s most basic tools are a hammer and a saw, a farmer’s most basic tool is a tractor. A farm tractor is basically a very big engine that drives two very big wheels, although many tractors now have four-wheel-drive. To allow for different types of field work, a tractor has a wide selection of gear ranges.
Old farm tractors, and the draft horses that they slowly replaced during the 1940s, simply towed implements such as plows and harrows. Modern tractors have what is called a 3-point hitch that uses a hydraulic pump to lift implements at the end of each row and lower them again at the start of the next row. The implement is attached to the tractor at three points, hence the name. This saves time, and allows for better use of the whole field Ð old tractors and their implements had a wide turning circle. The “headlands” Ð the area where the tractor turned around at top and bottom of the field Ð had then to be plowed or cultivated with some careful driving.
At agricultural college in England in the 1950s, we were taught to plow with draft horses. These big, gentle beasts pulled a single- or double-furrow plow, and it took a lot of trips up and down a field to turn the soil. We had tractors, but our instructor said, “Any damn fool thinks he can plow with a tractor. But when you learn to plow with a horse, then you have to know what you’re doing.” We walked miles each day, the horses and us students, plodding up and down the field while the instructor yelled comments and criticism. The horses had a much better understanding of the job than we did, sometimes refusing to obey a command that they knew was wrong.
A surprising number of farmers, here in the U.S. and in Europe, still use draft horses for farm work. They are undeniably slower than a tractor, but they are “lighter on the land” and don’t compact soil the way a heavy tractor does. If you have two or three of them, perhaps one stallion and two mares, they will give you a new foal every year, to use or sell. That’s something no tractor can do. Several companies still make field implements for horse work.
EECO Farm is about to buy a new farm tractor, a relatively small John Deere that will be almost as light on the land as horses. It will consume diesel fuel instead of hay and oats, and it won’t need the daily care and maintenance, and comfortable housing, that horses do. It will allow our crew, led by farm manager Paul Hamilton, to put “steel in the field,” the organic farmer’s way to use tillage instead of chemicals to maintain the health of the soil.
This is an appropriate place to thank the many donors, big and small, who have given money to help us buy this tractor. A special thank-you goes to the Evan Frankel Foundation, which generously offered a matching grant that doubled the money we raised.
Maybe next year, or the year after, we can get a pair of Shires, or Clydesdales, or Percherons, or another breed of those wonderful animals that were used by generations of farmers. Those men farmed organically, returning the horses’ manure to the fields and allowing the earth to rest between crops. They treasured the tilth of fine soil, and knew — as we do — that if you take care of the soil it will repay you with a generous bounty of crops.