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 ...
I am assuming that since the field is plowed (the whole point), no RoundUp™ or diesel fuel is needed.. That starts the draft animal farm off with a huge advantage per acre. After the crop is planted, the costs are exactly the same.
oof! according to the urban dictionary it’s Bohemian...
And Mao...
We already got the "bare foot doctors" at our local community "first provider" health stations ...courtesy of 0bambiCare...
Next up....
Back yard smelting and the "Great Leap Forward"....
and expect a cultural revolution and re-education for all miscreants.
I don’t think the discussion is about farms run, or contracted, by ADM.
Farmers should make their own biofuel.
It won’t work on the ten thousand acre fields of the High Plains.
They must plant three times the crop as the animals have to also eat.
Agriculture is a labor intensive form of work. It used to be done by indentured servants, serfs, slaves. Now tractors do the work.
Why do you think so many of the children of the farmers fled to the Big City!
And then when you do have a crop ready for harvest, here comes the “White Harvester” for you! It happened to us in 1951, then drought in 1952. We then left the farm.
Will the reeducation camp that I’m sent to be tuition free and have nice dorms?
These people are still delighted that Pol Pot kept the Cambodian population from exploding...
Mules, we need more mules.
Want more oxen power, stick some ginger up their butt.
“I never realized that there were so many FReepers from the city. Because only city people could read this article and believe it.”
Amen to that!
Farmers will have to work harder? Most idiotic statement on the thread, obviously made by someone who has never plowed behind a mule, or even watched someone plow behind a mule. I have done some of one and a lot of the other.
It will take millions of healthy, able-bodied, mostly men until we can beef our women up to Russian peasant standard, who will plow from daylight to dark to put in a crop that will still not equal modern agriculture. And then the same number who will harvest the crop. And many in between those times to hoe the weeds out of the crop.
(Go look at the population and acres-farmed history of North Dakota for proof. Why was North Dakota’s population so much higher in the early 1900s than today? Horse-drawn agriculture required huge numbers of poorly paid physical laborers. More acreage is farmed for more bushels per acre today by just a handful of mechanized farmers.)
How could this oxen scheme possibly work? Aha! The ‘Rats favorite political party, the Kmer Rouge, worked it out in Cambodia! Take millions of people from the cities and make them work the fields. I am quite sure that you can find a lot of “intelligentsia” in Madison that admire the Kmer Rouge.
These are hobby farmers who are NOT going to force their children to work the fields dawn to dusk and will soon give this up. It’s hard to work behind a plow in old age, most can’t do it, even if willing. Without a LOT of children to carry on (because some will run away), this kind of farming dies out easily.
Oh, and what if all those 8 to 10 children do want to continue farming? They have to somehow get their own land, because this measly 40 to 80 acres won’t support them when they have their necessary children.
No doubt they will sell their hobby produce for a great deal of money in Madison and other elite enclaves, but only in comparison to the evil produce of modern farms. They won’t be able to compete in the general marketplace, because they won’t have enough product. Ever.
This is complete economic silliness by Utopian fools.
Hell it won’t work on hundred acre farms. Hobby farmers can do it if they wish but real farmers wouldn’t even consider such stupidity.
LOL..soooo true
Really? You are going to feed the world by using oxen to plow millions upon millions of acres? What fantasy world do you inhabit?
****More overblown dirtworship dreams. *****
Like the hippie farm communes of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Fun for a few weeks then they realize it it REALLY IS WORK! then back to the city.
Didn't the History Channel or someone do a series along these lines? What little I saw of it, I seem to remember the people not exactly enjoying the frontier lifestyle.
All who predict shortage are right. If oxen or even horses/mules are used, the results will be subsistence farming. Don’t romanticize it.
No, it won’t.
“Farming with draft animals, while more time consuming, is VERY profitable. Ask the Amish about it.”
Your “more-time-consuming” phrase is very telling. If you assign no “expense” to your own labor, lots of stuff is “VERY profitable.” Heck, get rid of the oxen and resort to hoe tilling, and profit will really soar.
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