Draft Animal Power vs. Biofuel Farming

By Simon Fairlie
Updated on June 24, 2022
article image
by Adobestock/prasannapix

In the census of horses conducted by the Board of Trade in 1920, there were 19,743 thoroughbreds in Britain, out of a total of 2,192,165 horses. More than two-thirds of all these were draught horses, of which 774, 934 were in active agricultural work, ploughing the bulk of the 4.5 million hectares under cultivation (about the same area as today). By 1939, the number of horses on British farms had declined to less than a million, and during the 1950s virtually all of them disappeared — displaced, some say, not so much by tractors as by tractors with front-loaders. Those of us brought up in the 1950s are the last to remember working Shires, horse-drawn coalmen and rag-and-bone men, not to mention details like the hessian feed bags attached ’round the muzzles of horses during lunch break so that nothing spilled onto the clean suburban streets.

Britain, being at the forefront of civilization, yielded to petrol hegemony quicker than most nations. Western Europe has followed suit, but even in the 1980s you could still see, for example, a leathery French peasant guiding his yoke of oxen every morning along a certain stretch of the Route Nationale 9, not far from Rodez. I like to think they delayed the construction of the Autoroute 9 until the poor fellow was dead and buried, and in a broader sense they did. In Eastern European countries such as Poland and Romania, plowing with horses is still common practice, though under attack from EU modernizers. In the United States, horse cultivation is flourishing in the boondocks, inspired by the commercial success of the Amish communities, and aided by the fact that there is plenty of land to keep them on. In large parts of the Third World, draft animal power remains the only economic choice for small farmers.

It is at this stage in the evolution of farming technology that we are discovering that fossil fuels are causing more problems than they solve, and we are faced with need to find alternatives. “There are three horses in the race to replace petroleum – biofuels, electricity and hydrogen – and at various times you see the fortunes of these various horses ebb and flow,” a motor industry expert called Roland Hwang was quoted as saying in the New York Times. But however true that may be of the automobile industry, it will be some time before we see electric or hydrogen-powered tractors rivalling the use of diesel on the farm. The two main contenders are biofuels and the runner Hwang thought had been retired from the race – namely the horse.

These two sources of on-farm renewable energy are not incompatible, and there is no reason why they shouldn’t be carried out equally satisfactorily on adjacent farms. However, it is useful to compare their performance. The main problem is that one is faced with a superabundance of evolving data about the performance of biofuels, and a dearth of information about the performance of horses.

Draft Animal Power

Image by Fotolia/delmaslehman
Plowing with horses is still one of the most common methods used on farms around the world.
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