Farming for Self-Sufficiency-Independece on a 5-acre farm
(Page 5 of 9)
Other implements you can pull with a horse are many and
various. A ring-roll or Cambridge roll is a very good thing
to have; the rings can be bought separately and made up to
any width required. Cultivators, scufflers, expanding
horseshoes and steerage hoes come in great variety. An
implement I like is the old fashioned hoop-hoe, which any
blacksmith can make. The spring toothed harrow is a
marvelous implement. A tractor normally tows a gang of
these: a horse will easily pull just one member of the gang
and you can adjust the depth at which the tines go down
into the soil. These spring-toothed harrows are easy of
draught and marvelous at pulling down clods and getting a
seed bed, and you can often get them at farm sales.
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Digging by hand, or hoeing by hand, are immensely slow and
laborious jobs. Cobbett, writing in 1820, claimed that a
man could dig with the spade twelve rods a day. A modern
man could not dig anything like so much, and 1 am fairly
certain that no man reared in a city could do a quarter of
it. A one-horse plough might very well do half an acre in a
day, or eighty rods. That is the difference. As for hoeing,
the difference is far greater: what would take a week to
hand-hoe can be done in an hour or two with a horse-hoe.
But mark, you will also have to hand-hoe your row crops in
the end no matter how many times you horse or tractor hoe
them. This is because no mechanical device can get in
between the plants in the rows, nor tell the difference
between a- weed and a plant. But a working horse lightens
the job of husbandry enormously; he really enables you to
get on top of your holding. As to where you can get all
these horse implements: well, up to now, farm sales have
been the answer. Up until 1970 anyway you could get
practically any horse implement you wanted, in Britain at
least, for a few shillings. Now people are beginning to buy
up horse ploughs to stick up outside pubs and the market is
wearing thin. Ireland, incidentally, is a richer source of
old horse tools than is England, and in France or Belgium
you can still get anything you want in this line new:
although God help you when you try to get it through the
British customs.
HARNESS...
One thing you have to have with a horse, of course, is
harness. This you used to be able to buy up at farm sales
for a few pennies or sometimes get for nothing; now if it
is any. good it is snapped up and hung on a pub wall. You
can get good harness, new or secondhand, on the Continent
still, or in Eire, and Spain makes some of the best harness
in the world, and the cheapest. The imagination boggles at
trying to get past the British customs though. If you can
use a needle you can do a lot in the way of repairing old
harness, but if the leather has perished then it is
useless. Harness hung up on pub walls for a year or two is
ruined: one thing leather can't stand is drying out.
Harness must have oil: not too much but enough. In South
Africa we used to use mutton fat, and it worked very well.
In Britain people generally use neat's foot oil. You should
oil or grease the grain side-that is the rough inside of
the leather, but wash the polished outside of the leather
with water and saddle soap. It seems a general rule that
animal fats and oils are better for animal products,
vegetable for vegetable (e.g., linseed oil for cricket
bats) and mineral for mineral (e.g., mineral oil for motor
cars). Wet is the enemy of leather, but oil keeps it out.
Heat is a worse enemy: to dry harness on a radiator is to
kill it stone dead.
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