What will happen when Grantville introduces nineteenth-century farm equipment to seventeenth-century farmers? Will there be a rapid adaptation of the new machines followed by a similarly rapid increase in productivity? Will this in turn lead to an equally rapid decrease in the numbers of farm laborers? What factors will shape the mechanization of USE farms and how will mechanization shape the USE? All these are questions that occur in the background of the 1632 series. This article attempts to explore these questions and make my estimates at the correct answers.
The seventeenth-century farming methods were labor-intensive and time-consuming, requiring large groups of people to plant, care for, and harvest the crops. Despite this, in normal times, the farming villages of Germany were producing enough food to support themselves and had extra produce for sale to the cities. Economically these villages ranged from very poor villages that barely managed to stay above subsistence level to quite wealthy surplus-farming villages.
One thing to remember always is that the early modern German farmers were not ignorant, stupid, illiterate, or superstition-ridden. Books and pamphlets on farming were very popular and widely read. While translations of Roman texts on farming were considered the authoritative texts, farmers did not slavishly follow the advice found there. Three-field crop rotation, not mentioned by the Romans, had been practiced for centuries by farmers throughout Europe. In this method each field was left fallow every third year. The village livestock grazed on the fallow field, fertilizing it with their dung. After harvest the village animals were set to graze on the remains of the harvest, again fertilizing the fields. Farmers might not know why it worked but they could see the results. The German farmers will be interested in Grantville's knowledge and machinery.
Disease and destruction has reduced the available labor in many areas. Add the pressures of the growing industries around Grantville competing for what labor exists and the farms will remain short of people to work the crops. This lack of farm laborers will be a driver for mechanization.
Farming is a balancing act at any time. The difference between successful harvest and starvation is dependent upon numerous factors. Bad weather and insect invasions may destroy the crops. Outbreaks of disease could remove enough manpower to make planting and harvesting difficult to impossible. Diseases among the livestock might kill off or debilitate enough animals to edge the farmers into starvation. During the Thirty Years' War, additional stresses were added when scavenging parties from one army or another would steal or destroy crops and animals. Farmers who fled the armies could not tend their crops, leading to losses. When the farmers did return to their villages, they often did not have sufficient manpower to plant or harvest.
A few things need to be made clear about German farming villages in the seventeenth century. Unlike the USA model of single-family farms, Germans farms consisted of a village—known as the Gemeinde—farming as a whole. Physically, the German farming community more closely resembled a fried egg on a plate than the USA model of neatly-laid-out individual farms of rectangular fields bounded by straight roads crossing at right angles. Consider the yolk to represent the village and the white to represent the fields and land around the village. Village land sizes ranged from roughly 640 acres to nearly six thousand acres with the average size around one to two thousand acres. This average village would have roughly two to three hundred acres in crops and about another one hundred acres in pasture and hay growing. Villages also had fishponds, forests, and meadows held and used in common. Villages normally ranged in size from ten to ninety households.
The village was run as a communal corporation, complete with elected officers. The farmers decided communally what to grow in which fields. Each farmer had a strip of land assigned to him from which he took his profits and food. The amount of land an individual farmer had the rights to could vary in size. Also, each farmer had the rights to pasture a certain number of cows on his share of the village commons. A farmer was by definition a person who held enough land in the village corporation to support himself and his family by farming, using a combined workforce of his own family members and a couple of hired men or girls. A farmer who held this kind of share in the lands had a full vote in the village Gemeinde, was expected to do his share in holding local offices, etc. The average farmer leased around forty to eighty acres of arable land. Finally, draft animals might belong to individual farmers but they were used communally.
The villagers were not serfs. The village lands were held by written lease from the landowners. A common lease ran for ninety-nine years or three lives, whichever came first. A village usually owed rents to several landowners, as land rights could and often were subdivided, leased, sold, inherited, etc. Think of it as somewhat equivalent to the landowners as shareholders of stock and the rents as dividends. Thus a village mayor and council would collect the revenue and send one sixteenth to X, one eighth to Y, three thirty-seconds to Z, and so forth.
The harvesting of the 1631 crop using up-time machines to replace the missing farm labor would have given the down-time farmers a glimpse of what mechanization can do for harvesting. The use of Grantville's machines to aid in the following spring's planting would drive the lesson home. Mechanization allows you to farm with fewer people and, as many of the machines do not require adult strength, you can now use younger family members. By the fall harvest of 1632 those farmers around Grantville know that mechanization does reduce labor requirements and costs. Some local down-time farmers may begin to see how Grantville's machines and knowledge also improves the yield per acre.
Grantville brings with it practical and theoretical knowledge, mechanized farm machinery, and up-time livestock. The introduction of Grantville's farm machines will bypass, to some degree, several centuries of slow development and mechanization of the farm which were required in our time line. ("Our time line" will be henceforth abbreviated as OTL.)
That does not, however, mean that farm mechanization will necessarily develop very rapidly or evenly. In OTL, mechanization of farms in the United States required around 120 to 150 years—and even now, in the twenty-first century, there are still large areas of the world where farming is not mechanized at all or is only minimally mechanized. Before galloping off with grandiose ideas about how fast mechanization will spread in the 1632 universe, we should look at why it took so long in OTL and why it has not completely spread even in the twenty-first century OTL.
One reason OTL mechanization did not spread faster was that the equipment itself developed slowly. As Grantville has examples of fully developed draft animal– and tractor-powered mechanized farming equipment, this developmental phase will be bypassed. Time factors on the machinery side will primarily be how fast the horse-drawn equipment can be copied and adapted for manufacture with available resources. Tractors must wait until the tools and materials are available to manufacture engines. Still, farm machinery at least to an OTL 1930s level should be available by 1650–1660.
Aside from availability, the major factor retarding mechanization was the cost of the new farm machinery. To a single farmer, the OTL model in the USA, cost was often the biggest problem in mechanizing. In modern OTL examples of non-mechanized farming it appears that cost remains a major factor for the lack of mechanization.
Usually the speed of mechanization comes down to costs, infrastructure problems, and some social factors. Farm costs, regardless of the time period, include the cost of the land, of labor, of livestock, of the farmer's subsistence, and the purchase and upkeep of any implements or machines. Against these costs are the profits from each crop or animal raised. Profits must exceed the operating costs or the farmer loses. Farmers tend to be very fiscally conservative because of these factors.
The cost of the land is something our down-time farmers obviously already know. The farmers have been able to produce sufficient crops and livestock to pay their land rents. Without sudden increases in rents, the down-time farmers have no incentive to mechanize from land costs.
Land costs can be considered as a neutral factor for mechanization. Labor costs, the number of people required to raise and harvest a crop using down-time methods, are also known.
Infrastructure costs include those concerning the initial machinery costs, maintenance and repair costs of the machine, the power source and its fuel, maintenance, repair, and upkeep cost, and costs associated with storage and shipping of the crops.
Social factors tend toward the universal desire to not be seen by neighbors and relatives as backward and unfashionable. This factor has led OTL farmers into financial trouble and will undoubtedly ruin some down-time farmers also.
Farms are businesses and you cannot afford to farm at a loss. A money trap OTL farmers encounter is when that shiny new tractor costs $100,000 and raises gross profits by 15 percent but, between the cost of the loan, fuel, and maintenance, it costs 25 percent more to use it. A net loss of 10 percent will quickly put a farm in a financial hole. To quote a farmer cousin, "People romanticize the family farm and forget it is a business. You must at least break even and the idea is to make a profit. It's easy to only count the money in your hand at the end of harvest and forget what it cost you to make that harvest—at least until the bills come due."
Grantville, under the direction of Willie Ray Hudson, is developing granges to help with the spread and utilization of up-time knowledge and technology. Granges are basically cooperative groups of farmers who pool knowledge, machinery, labor, and money. As the German farming villages were already communal farmers, the granges should fit in nicely.
Where a single farmer might not be able to afford a new piece of farm machinery, the farming village can; and if the village can't afford it, the grange can. Cooperative arrangements for the use of these machines will be negotiated along with the repayments of the loans required to obtain them. The machinery manufacturers will also extend credit in some places and perhaps lease equipment to those who can not afford to buy. This cooperative buying should make farm mechanization occur more rapidly than in OTL. Still, there are some potential bumps. Unfortunately, due to the nature of farming this cooperative sharing of equipment can only go so far. The limited time period for successful planting puts limits on the sharing of some farm machinery.
The cooperative nature of the early modern German farming villages can be both more and less conducive to a rapid adaptation of mechanization. On the more conducive side, there is the factor that the village farms will be better able to afford the new machines. However, conservatism on the part of the villages' governing councils may retard rapid adaptation. Farmers tend to be very conservative; it is their livelihood and homes that are on the line. Once it becomes clear that the reluctant farmers will have to adopt machinery or be satisfied with considerably lower profits and higher labor rates than neighboring villages, this should change. Here the granges should help not only by spreading the cost of machines out among several villages but also by persuading reluctant farmers to mechanize to some extent. In part, this last involves social as well as economic pressures.
OTL mechanization began with the development of horse-drawn farm equipment, firstly in plows, reapers, and seed drills. Once the inventions began to show promise they were adopted as they became available and affordable. Similarly in the 1632 universe the first wave of mechanization will be animal powered. Power will be provided by horses, mules, and oxen. As a note, the switch in draft power from primarily oxen to primarily horses or mules occurred for social and status as well as economic reasons. Horses could pull greater loads faster and longer than oxen but they cost more to purchase and maintain. By the seventeenth century, European farmers overwhelmingly preferred horses to oxen for draft purposes. The use of oxen in farming seems to have been equated with backward and poor farmers. Oxen can be used with horse-drawn machinery, and given the shortage of draft animals in the war zone any draft animal available will be used.
Steam-driven tractors were first introduced in the late nineteenth century but were not practical or truly economically viable for most farmers. It was with the development of gasoline engines that tractors became both practical and affordable. Grantville most likely will totally bypass the steam phase of tractors. Once internal combustion engines can be built in numbers, farm tractors will became available. Probably the first tractors will not be easily affordable and we may see the rise of specialty companies such as the OTL harvest and threshing crews. Because these companies lease their labor and machines the costs can be spread amongst numerous villages.
[A side note here: In Grantville there exists a steam engine hobbyists' group who have the knowledge and practical experience to build better steam engines than were available in the nineteenth century. They will build such engines and these engines will be useful on farms as stationary power sources for threshers, balers, loaders, etc. It is their use as power sources for tractors that is unlikely to occur.]
Let's look at affordability as it applies to all mechanized farm equipment. Availability is important, but affordability is critical. The problem is not the just the initial cost of the farm machinery, but also the cost of upkeep—repair, maintenance, and fuel. These same costs have driven the spread of farm mechanization throughout its OTL history.
A major driver in the slowness of the OTL adaptation of tractors was not just the initial cost of the tractors but was the infrastructure cost. The first nonsteam OTL tractors were very expensive but they also had new requirements for fuel, fuel storage, maintenance, and repair. These new requirements added up to new costs to the farmer. In addition, switching to tractors generally meant having to either alter or scrap existing horse-drawn equipment. For some of the later tractors there was no way to adapt horse-drawn equipment so the farmer was forced to buy new equipment, driving the costs of tractor mechanization even higher.
Grantville may be able to sidestep this incompatibility if they decide from the start to produce tractor versions of farm equipment and introduce the use of a fore cart. A fore cart is just what it says; a cart that sits between the gangplow or seeder and has a team of horses hitched to it. OTL fore carts vary between those that simply adapt the tractor hitch system to horse-drawn and those carts that carry a motor and/or a hydraulic pump to operate the tractor version equipment.
Down-time farmers will have the same concerns about the costs of the machines as the OTL up-timers had. It isn't just the costs associated with tractors. After all, the repairs, maintenance, and fuel required by draft animals are also costs. The biggest difference between the competing power systems is that the down-time farmers understand the costs and problems involved with draft animals but will view the first tractors as carrying many unknown costs.
Mechanization, however fast or slowly it occurs, will quickly bring benefits. Mechanization can be as simple as a better tool. The walking plow has no moving parts and is not radically different from the old heavy wooden plow. Better yet, someone familiar with using a heavy wooden plow will be able to quickly learn to use the walking plow. The walking plow alone decreases the time it takes to plow an acre of land. Those farmers who adopt only the walking plow will experience a decrease in the labor (man-hours) required by their wheat crop. Farmers using a walking plow with their old harrows, hand broadcasting of seed, harvesting with scythe, and threshing with flails will find that their wheat crop takes 50–60 man-hours per acre and yields 20 bushels per acre. This results in 2.5 to 3 man-hours per bushel. The same fields plowed with the heavy wooden plow generally took 100–120 man-hours per acre or 5–6 man-hours per bushel for the same 20 bushels per acre yield.
The motive power—horses, oxen, or mules—are available and the farmers know how to feed and maintain them. Better yet, the down-time farmers usually already have these draft animals and the walking plow requires fewer animals, oxen or horses, than the heavy wooden plow. While suitable draft animals are in short supply due to the war, they are being bought outside the war zone and brought in.
Another factor in favor of starting with the simpler up-time equipment is that what little maintenance is required by the walking plow can be done by the farmer. The local blacksmith can do any repairs the farmer can't handle. Here the supporting infrastructure for the mechanization already exists. Overall the costs for a walking plow are low and will be familiar to the farmers, which makes it a good first step.
The next step up in mechanization is introducing the sulky or gangplow, seed drills or mechanical seeders, binders, and bull threshers. Each piece of equipment can be added without need for the rest. Thus, a village can pay for the next piece of equipment with the profits from the last. The increases in yields and drop in labor requirements are great enough to justify moving to this level of mechanization. The complete package, gangplow, mechanical seeders, binders, and bull threshers drop the labor rates down to 8–10 man-hours per acre and 0.4–0.5 man-hours per bushel for a 20 bushel per acre yield.
This increase in productivity does have additional costs. A sulky or gangplow is quite a bit more expensive both to buy and to maintain. On the sulky plow the farmer had two, three, or four plowshares or bottoms and he rode on top of it instead of walking behind. Upgrading from a walking plow would not require extensive retraining. The seed drills and mechanical seeders also fall into the mechanically more complex and expensive category. They improve the yield of the crops by making planting more uniform. Their use was faster and less labor intensive than planting by hand, especially for row crops such as beans and corn.
To achieve the low man-hours above, the farmers must use a binder and thresher. Here things get more complicated. Because Grantville has the advantage of being on the end of the development phase for horse-drawn farm equipment, it is likely that they will skip over reapers and go directly into binders and eventually combines.
A quick look at reapers still is useful.
When the first reapers appeared on the scene they revolutionized harvesting. No longer was the grain cut by hand. With the reaper the cut wheat still would be raked and hand stooked for later threshing. The binder took the next step and, as the name says, bound the stooks and dropped them neatly behind it, ready to be tossed on the wagon and taken to the thresher. No longer were stooking teams needed to hand bind the wheat, eliminating one of the most labor intensive and backbreaking jobs on the farm. The mechanical thresher was another quantum leap forward over using flails and hand winnowing, processing in one day what had taken weeks to thresh before. Once more a time-consuming and labor-intensive operation was replaced.
The price for this massive increase in productivity was both monetary and increased mechanical complexity. Reapers and later binders and combines were the single most expensive piece of farm equipment. Early on it was not uncommon for the wealthiest farmer in the area to own the reaper and rent it out to other farmers. In OTL, machinery costs led to the development of specialty harvesting crews and farmer's cooperatives to purchase and operate the harvesting machines.
Binders are more mechanically complicated than sulky plows and seed drills. Repair and maintenance require greater mechanical skills and a bigger toolbox. The farmers, having learned to maintain their other farm equipment, should still be able to do some of the repairs themselves. The local blacksmith can make other, more complicated repairs. However, additional players come on the scene now.
Mechanical complexity has its own costs. Farmers who have not had to deal with anything beyond pulleys and wagon wheels now are going to have to deal with slipped belts, jammed gears, twisted chains, and remembering to lubricate the moving parts. The farmers will have to learn not just what an open-end wrench is but where it is used. As with any advance in technology some people will adapt easily, others will struggle, and some will fail. In OTL, this advancement occurred over several generations and when mechanization was entering into all aspects of life. Because of the accelerated mechanization Grantville is promoting, the down-time farmer may find himself unable to decipher the inner workings of a reaper. Exposure to the machines will mean that our poor befuddled farmer's children will find mechanisms easier to understand and fix. Thus the second generation of farmers should be both more mechanically savvy and inclined to further mechanization.
The accelerated mechanization also means that the farm machinery manufacturers will have to not just briefly demonstrate the new machines but really teach the farmers how to operate, maintain, and repair them. These jobs fall to the manufacturers' representative or dealer who sells machines, trains farmers in their care and operation, and handles replacement parts. In OTL, some manufacturers also began providing for repair work that was beyond the farmer's or local blacksmith's abilities. This was the introduction of the factory-trained mechanic. The factory-trained mechanic's services were usually available through the manufacturer's representative or dealer at a price. Because of human nature and the need of manufacturers to charge higher prices to cover overhead, there should also arise the independent mechanic and his repair shop.
In OTL, along with the reapers, binders, and combines a new category of worker appeared: the mechanical specialist or mechanic. Sometimes these were blacksmiths, sometimes farm boys, but they were always young men who were fascinated by machines and how they worked. With the ever-increasing complexity of machines, these mechanics began to be necessary parts of the infrastructure. A mechanic could afford to own the specialized tools necessary for uncommon repairs. He had the arcane knowledge of how linkages and pulleys worked and why you really needed a washer under that nut over there. OTL farmers still did most of the maintenance of their equipment themselves, but when they were stumped by a problem they could call in the mechanic. In Grantville, these mechanics will be even more critical for the beginnings of farm mechanization.
While the motive power for the farm machines discussed above remain draft animals, the reaper or binder requires larger teams. This adds the costs of buying and maintaining the additional horses and harnesses to the cost of the binder. The additional horses usually mean some additional farm laborer(s) to tend them. Due to the seasonal requirements for these draft animals, the OTL farmer might make arrangements to lease the teams or work cooperatively with other farmers. In Grantville, with the communal farming and the establishment of granges, it is likely that there will be cooperative ownership and use of binders.
The introduction of tractors and all things motorized in OTL took the mechanical complexity level beyond what many horse-drawn-era farmers were comfortable with. When OTL motive power became tractors, the farmer needed a new set of skills and knowledge in addition to what was needed to run the horse-drawn farm equipment. It was usually the next generation that took up the use of tractors. The farmers' children learned to deal with the mechanical complexities of tractors while growing up around them. With the introduction of the tractor, repairs or replacements that a farmer could not do himself were also introduced. These repairs had to go to the equipment dealer or an independent mechanic and that added to operational costs. Additionally, the introduction of the tractor meant that fuel had to be purchased and stored. A horse might up and die on you but he wouldn't quit working because you forgot to check the fuel storage tank. Tractors meant the farmer had new costs and requirements to deal with for his motive power.
The farmers in the USE will have similar problems adapting to tractor use. We know that oil production is starting up and eventually there will be gasoline available, but the infrastructure for distribution and on-farm storage of the gasoline must also be developed. Perhaps fortunately, Grantville will not see new internal combustion engines being manufactured in great numbers for several years to come. This delay should allow for other necessary elements of infrastructure to catch up.
Going to full tractor-driven mechanization allows for an incredible leap in productivity. Using a tractor, a 12-foot plow, a 14-foot drill, 14-foot self-propelled combine, and trucks, should give the farmer labor rates of 1.5 man-hours per acre and 0.05 man-hours per bushel for a 30 bushel per acre yield. Remember these same fields plowed with the heavy wooden plow took 100–120 man-hours per acre or 5–6 man-hours per bushel for a 20 bushels per acre yield. Add in that laborers will be in short supply due to the accompanying increases in industries, and the down-time farmers will be forced to adopt some level of mechanization.
This will not come without a price. The first price is the cost of the farm machines themselves. The second price is the need to understand and deal with the increased mechanical complexity of that machinery. The third price is the need for supporting technology infrastructures. To accomplish such a leap in farm mechanization requires equal leaps in many other industries. Bringing seventeenth-century farming up to OTL 1930's levels cannot be done unless the supporting industries also are brought up to those same levels. Among the required supporting industries and infrastructure are:
Steel plants
Foundries
Mechanical design engineers
Electrical design engineers
Machine shops
Bearings
Gears
Gas engines
Batteries
Spark plugs
Farm machinery factories
Trained mechanics
Refineries and fuel distribution systems
My own estimate is that it will take until 1640 to begin to produce the simpler horse-drawn farm machines in any numbers. As discussed above, these machines will make a great difference in the productivity of the down-time farms. The major problem once the farm machines are available will be how much the machines cost to purchase and operate and the availability of mechanics to maintain them until the farmers learn to do their own maintenance. Some time in the decade of the 1640s, I can see the development of traveling mechanics who spend the year going from farm to farm working on the new horse-drawn farm implements and teaching the farmers how to use and maintain them.
There are other means of increasing farm productivity besides mechanization.
Along with the new farm equipment there will be modern tillage methods taught and the introduction of a few new crops and new livestock strains. Some of the tillage methods will increase crop yields even without the new machines. The up-time livestock such as dairy and beef cattle also have the potential for greatly increasing yields without any new machines.
We know that beef cattle exist in sufficient numbers around Grantville to keep twentieth-century breeds going. Not all the up-time breeds will have enough breeding stock to remain pure but an aggressive breeding program should see results in general beef cattle. This happened in OTL, with the size of cattle brought to one meat market for slaughter doubling in weight over a century. With the up-time cattle as a start and the up-time knowledge of genetics and nutrition it should be possible to duplicate the OTL gain in size faster. Dairy cattle are more problematic as there are fewer of them around Grantville. Again, the various breeds may not have enough numbers to remain distinct but there should be enough to breed dairy specific cows. With greater milk yields the farmers have not only better family nutrition, but also can sell surplus dairy products such as cheese and butter for profit.
Beef is raised for both sustenance and sale. Doubling the slaughter weight of cattle increases both and may move some marginal farm villages and farmers out of mostly sustenance farming and into mostly sale farming. In some of the areas where farming is marginal due to the land types, these beef cattle may cause a switch to cattle-raising-only farms.
Dairy cattle also provide sustenance and some profit. A dairy cow provides milk and calves. The milk may be used by the farmer or sold. The cow's calf can either be slaughtered for the family's meat, sold for slaughter, or sold for breeding. With dairy-specific cows there can be extra milk for making cheese for sustenance and sale instead of just subsistence. Research has not come up with any milk yields for seventeenth-century cows but we could safely say that yields will at least double.
In the seventeenth century there was not the distinction between beef and dairy cattle that exists now. Cows gave enough milk to support their calves and have some left for the farmer's family but the amounts were small. Similarly, when slaughtered the cow did not yield the masses of meat found on modern beef cattle.
Also, as the power sources for most of the farmers are going to be animals for quite a bit yet, Grantville's veterinarians and their knowledge will also contribute to farm productivity.
Tillage methods and theories will also help along with the specialized tools to accomplish them. A fairly simple tool that certainly should be available in Grantville is a hillside plow—which is a plow especially designed for contour plowing on hillsides and slopes. As to the various theories, well, those arguments should make for interesting grange meetings.
Fertilizers and their use will be a great boon as will the pretreatment of seed to prevent fungus. Even without up-time chemical fertilizers, the knowledge the up-time farmers have of using natural fertilizers will be a great step forward. The down-time farmers do know about resting fields and letting their livestock self-fertilize the resting fields, but they do not know why it works. Another useful up-time knowledge set is just which crops should be planted in what order to restore nutrients to the soils. The spread of this knowledge should spark some lively debates and new and different answers to farmer's problems.
In the end, I'll quote my farmer cousin again. "Farmers are conservative. If what they are already doing works, they aren't going to jump on the next new thing just because it is new. Most of them will wait until somebody else shows that the new gadget works better than what they have. And it has to work a whole lot better or a whole lot cheaper to get them to change." Admittedly he is just one farmer, but the same philosophy has run his family farm for over a hundred years and run it at a profit.
Assuming a well-conditioned team, equipment in good repair, and ten hours in the field, with two 1,500-pound horses, in one day you can expect to:
Plow 1.5–2 acres
Cultivate (single row) 7 acres
Harrow 8–10 acres
Mow 7 acres
Seed drill 8–10 acres
Rake 14 acres
Plant 8–10 acres
Haul on a wagon 1.5 tons 20–25 miles
Four horses could accomplish twice as much with the same human labor, but would require implements twice as wide. Where the draft horses are smaller than 1,500 pounds, three horses may be needed to accomplish the same amount of work.
These requirements assume modern-size draft horses of 15.5 to 16 hand and 1,400 to 1,600 pounds. This is the size horse known today as a "chunk." The use of smaller draft horses would require an increase in the number of horses per team. This is only a partial listing of farm equipment.
Gladitz, Charles. Horse Breeding in the Medieval World. Four Courts Press, 1997. Dublin.
Hyland, Ann. The Horse in the Middle Ages. Sutton Publishing Limited, 1999.
Langdon, John. Horses, Oxen and Technological Innovation. Cambridge University Press, 1986. Cambridge.
Telleen, Maurice. The Draft Horse Primer. Draft Horse Journal, Inc., 1977.
www.ruralheritage.com
Recommended site to start with. Lots of good information on four-legged farming.
www.history.rochester.edu/appleton/a/agmac-m.html
History of agricultural equipment. A very good site for those interested in horse-drawn farm equipment and the nuts and bolts of using it. This site uses illustrations from the nineteenth century to explain how things work.
www.farmerbrownsplowshop.bigstep.com
Lots of good stuff and pictures of modern farming and logging with horses.
http://ag.smsu.edu/cweq72a.htm
Pictures of many horse-drawn implements from Southwest Missouri State University.
www.erm.ee/pysi/engpages/kyla.html
Pictures of an Estonian farm whose buildings are similar to those of Germany in the seventeenth century.
www.science-tech.nmstc.ca/english/collection/
Canadian Museum of Technology. One should read this entire marvelous site.
www.ikisan.com/machine/cache/ma_tillageequipments.asp
An "everything you ever wanted to know about farming" site.
www.grange.org/
Information on granges and their development in the USA.