Rural Heritage December 2025/January 2026

The horse (or donkey) is very maneuverable and useful for a job like skidding heavy logs out of tight places. Photo by Caleb Courteau

hitches so that one teamster could drive several horses to pull larger implements, producing, thus, far more work per man-hour. Many farmers neither liked nor trusted the new tractor technology, nor could they afford it, and they continued using their horses or mules, while on other farms (like the Minnesota farm where I was raised) some combination of tractor power and live horse power was worked out for a while. The rivalry grew.“Sell that last team,”advised the title of one article of a leading farm magazine, while others from agriculture’s informational community were not entirely sold on the new ways.Some,like Professors F.B. Morrison of Cornell (Feeds and Feeding) and Arthur Anderson of Iowa State University (Introductory Animal Husbandry) were ambivalent, and cautioned a go-slow approach, basing their positions mainly on economics. But the outcome is history. By the 1950s, horses had been all but abandoned.

The reasons for leaving animal power behind probably had less to do with complex economic rationalism than with simple worship of the machine. The arguments had revolved mostly around narrowly economic or technical considerations, like the cost of feed or gasoline, the price of a tractor, the raw pulling power of a horse or its efficiency as a motor (i.e., the conversion of plant matter, its crude fuel, into usable energy, the acreage plowed per man hour, that sort of thing). But the whole debate was, in my opinion, out of focus and on the wrong plane, for it failed to take into account the enormous personal and social consequences of the shift away from animal power and into the big, new, motorized machinery. This has been no simple question, like, “Shall we use steam or shall we use diesel? Should we grow soybeans or corn?” For countless millions the adoption of the engine has determined not just how we do our work, but what kind of work we actually

December 2025/January 2026

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