Rural Heritage December 2025/January 2026

The manure spreader is another implement whose use persisted among many northern farmers long after other horse machinery was discarded. Horses can pull the spreader as effectively as a tractor, and you don’t have to bother with a hard-starting diesel engine in frigid temperatures. The cultivator, whether the one-horse double shovel once so popular in the South, or the riding cultivator drawn by two horses, is a very effective implement for weed control and soil aeration. A horse or a team can keep working at a fairly steady pace all day, with periodic rests. The two-handled double-shovel, like the walking plow, demands enough exertion from the farmer that he or she has no trouble finding the time and patience to take those frequent breathers, along with the horse, that they both need. The horse-drawn disk harrow is fairly effective, though not so good in sod, and it requires a very high energy input so it is best pulled by three big horses. Likewise the spring tooth harrow and the spike tooth harrow require much energy and are often used with a three-horse field hitch. These harrows, though, may be assembled in one, two or three sections, according to your needs and the strength of your team. Just one horse with a one-section harrow, after the plow, can prepare a good seed bed for your home garden or your market patch. The slip, or scraper, a big scoop with two handles, as an excellent device to move earth with two horses or to move heavy rocks off a field, or to clean out corrals or barn alleys. For moving earth, a plow is usually used to loosen the earth first. It’s in the choring, though, where animal power finds its best use on my farm, now that we no longer do logging or much field work. There’s nothing like a horse for the hauling or dragging or packing that needs done most every day around a farm. On the same day you might haul a few bags of range cubes and a load of baled hay out to the cows, and while you’re there pick up a load of firewood for the house. After lunch you haul some trash and skid a few rails in from the woods to fix the corral. Or if the fence needs fixing up there on that rough hillside pasture, you can throw a pack saddle on your animal, hang on a couple of homemade wooden boxes (panniers) with your chainsaw, tools and repair wire stuffed inside, and you’re set to go.

Small horses or mules, even donkeys, are especially good for this choring.You don’t need a team of Belgians to bring in a load of firewood. In fact, you don’t even need a team. For my money, the handiest device ever invented was the one-horse farm cart pulled by a small horse or mule, a big fat pony, a donkey, or any old plug broke to work. I have never understood why the two wheeled cart with shafts for one horse was so little used on the farms and ranches where I grew up on the northern plains. It’s so fast and easy to get just one animal harnessed and hitched for a quick chore! A more recent development, coming from the Amish, is the forecart, which can be fitted, interchangeably, with shafts for one horse or a tongue for two, and comes equipped with either a padded bench seat or an implement seat, and, usually, with mechanical or hydraulic brakes. A receiver hitch at the back allows your horses to pull implements with heavy tongue weight, such as a two-wheeled manure spreader, or this vehicle can be used as a road cart, an exercise cart, or an aid in breaking young horses. Power takeoff (PTO) forecarts are being marketed now, with engines for running the mechanical works of a towed implement, like the hay baler, but these contrivances are of little concern to us here. The above list does not exhaust, not nearly, the possibilities for the application of live horse power, but it should help provide the unacquainted with a general picture. What horses do less well is providing [supplying] the very large, prolonged inputs of energy demanded by the field work on today’s huge underpopulated farms. Nevertheless, I stand by my earlier statement that horses can do “a lot.” But how much is a lot? For an historical perspective on this question we might turn to the writings of Professor G.F. Warren, of Cornell University (Elements of Agriculture), who, from 100 years ago, still startles us with these statistics: In 1830, it required an average of three hours of time for each bushel of wheat grown; in 1896, it required 10 minutes. In 1850, it took four and one half hours to grow, harvest, and shell a bushel of corn; in 1899, it required 41 minutes. This saving of time has been due to the substitution of machinery drawn by horses for human labor. So the question of “a lot” is relative. Whoever has tried to spade up a large garden by hand knows that it is backbreaking work, agonizingly slow. So when a plowman in a nearby field heads down

December 2025/January 2026

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