Posted on 05/15/2011 7:01:59 AM PDT by bkopto
When farmers Danielle and Matt Boerson realised they could no longer afford to run their tractors, they took the bull by the horns - and ditched them for oxen.
Soaring petrol prices had become so high that the couple, who run an 80-acre farm near Madison, Wisconsin, were forced to get rid of their two tractors, hay baler, plough and rotavator.
So they took a course at the agricultural institute in traditional farming techniques.
'It gave me the confidence that, yes, I could do this', Danielle told the Times. 'It just required a lot of concentration and a firm voice.' Their instructor was former peace core volunteer Dick Roosenberg, 64, who learned the trade while working for the UN in West Africa. He took the skills he had honed back to Michigan and set up Tillers International.
At first the company was aimed at helping Third World farmers harvest in the cheapest way possible.
On the side, he also helped historically-themed villages. But his specialist knowledge is now enjoying a new wave of interest with farmers from Wisconsin to Alaska now joining his courses.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
There you go. That reminds me, didn’t Al Gore claim he farmed tobacco on the side of a hill with mules?
farmal H and c
Good tractors, and many still running.
Have you seen any oxen out there?
NOPE. Down around Arthur, IL. Where the Ahish community is You see a lot of horses but no oxen.
***That reminds me, didn’t Al Gore claim he farmed tobacco on the side of a hill with mules?****
I’ll have to ask my kin in Tennessee. Their momma used to babyset “little Al”.
All the family votes Republican!
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/campaigns/wh2000/stories/gore101099a.htm
...During his early years as a senator’s son in Washington, Al Gore was often the smallest one in the crowd, a pint-size boy with dark hair and freckles who lived with his prominent parents in Suite 809 atop the Fairfax Hotel along Embassy Row...
Human slaves would be even cheaper and more efficient.
‘Bammy’s vision of the future of America...
http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?document=545
40 acres and a mule....
I know next to nothing about farms, always lived on cattle ranches but I didn’t believe the part about farmers turning to oxen. Sounds to me like one idiot couple decided to do this. I know what it takes to maintain oxen, mules, horses- whatever would replace the tractor and have some idea there is no way this would work in the real world.
As high as fuel and other costs are for ranchers now I don’t hear any of them planning on doing things the way they were in the 1800s on the ranch. It simply would not pay because production would fall so far.
For those of you that do believe this- I can help you buy a horse or two to commute to work and you won’t have to buy any more fuel. Any takers?
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