Farming for Self-Sufficiency-Independece on a 5-acre farm
(Page 4 of 9)
Now one horse will not plough an acre a day, nor will he
plough very deep, or plough very rough ground.
Nevertheless, one horse can very well do the cultivations
of a smallholding. If the ground is too rough to put the
plough into it, put pigs on it. They will pioneer the way
for your one-horse plough for you. A horse will plough land
very well that has not been allowed to go too far, but long
tussocky grass, tough old pasture too coarse for sheep to
graze down properly or rough grass between apple trees,
your one-horse plough will not man use pigs, then get a
contractor in with a big tractor. And then, when your land
has been initially bust-up, keep it bust-up-by ploughing
and ploughing with your one horse, or dragging through it
such harrows and cultivators as you can lay your hands on.
Keep 'pulling of it about': grass is the enemy of the
plough: don't let it come back.
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The kind of horse plough that we use nowadays, when we do
use a horse plough (and one is very useful for row-crop
work even if you have got a tractor), is the Brabant. We
bought ours in Spain. This is a wheeled turning plough, or
one-way plough, with no handles. You don't have to hold it,
it steers itself as long as the horse walks in the furrow.
All you have to do is turn it round at the headland and
swing the shares over, so as to turn the furrow the other
way. As the plough is also turned the other way that means
that you go back ploughing the same way. Ploughing with a
one way plough, whether by horse or by tractor, is much
easier and demands less skill than ploughing with a
fixed-furrow plough. But if you try ploughing with a
fixed-furrow plough you will see the difficulty
immediately, and have to set about finding a way round it.
You must plough a furrow, then turn round and plough
another furrow against the first. You then go round and
round this, each time ploughing another furrow towards your
first two furrows: gathering the stetch as ploughmen say.
When you think you've gone far enough you can start another
stetch by laying out another top-in other words, going to
one side into unploughed ground and ploughing two more
virgin furrows leaning up against each other. The Horse in
the Fur row, by George Ewart Evans (Faber and Faber), is
the best book I have ever found dealing with this
complicated subject, but no book in the world can beat half
an hour's instruction from an old horseman. Good ploughing
with horses is a highly skilled and technical job, and it
takes years to learn to do it properly, but anybody can
scratch away with a plough well enough to turn his land
over somehow or other. Perfection will come with time.
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