Rural Heritage December 2025/January 2026

a furrow behind a good team, turning a steady stream of clods, it seems to the gardener nearly miraculous. And indeed it is, and for thousands of years the ox and later the draft horse performed this arduous task for mankind, in fields that were sized in proportion to their efforts. But fields that stretch as far as the eye can see — why, even the giant Belgians and Shires are only flesh and blood! It’s not that horses can’t farm large acreages, but it takes lots of them and lots of country folks to work with them. On the vast acreages farmed in the American West in the late 1800s enormous combines were pulled by as many as 50 horses to a single machine. About a century ago my own grandfather farmed with some 80 horses in North Dakota, but you can bet he didn’t feed and harness them all by himself every morning, and who wants to farm like that? But I seem to have been skirting all around this question of “Just how much …?” while in fact it is possible to give a more objective answer. Professor Arthur Anderson of Iowa State University, writing in 1943 (Introductory Animal Husbandry), estimated that one work horse was needed for about 25 or 30 acres of cultivated land. That acreage seemed

a little high to me, but an exhaustive study, conducted in 1929 for the USDA on 735 corn-belt farms classified according to power source, found that farms using horses only in big-team hitches of four or more tilled an average of 252 acres with 11 horses! Getting more personal and more precise, only recently, with a small but willing jenny weighing less than 500 pounds, hitched with a mule weighing about 675, I brought home a load of firewood weighing more than half a ton (1,091 pounds, to be exact, weighed stick by stick). We had come about ¾ of a mile, over a level meadow for a short distance, then down a long slope, followed by a moderate uphill pull and finally a hard pull raising the load 4 feet and 4 inches during the last 27 feet to the woodpile. (A good illustration, by the way, of that reserve power.) Finally, to the prospective organic horse farmer wanting to till a modest acreage with a draft team of average size and ability, I’ll say this: In the most demanding of all jobs, plowing, in moderate going, not heavy sod, if, when evening comes, you and your team with your walking plow have turned an acre, I’ll say you’ve done a good day’s work.

Rural Heritage

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