Horses hay acreage

Hey all -

This is a loaded question, as there are a lot of variables to consider, but: How many acres of hay would a work horse consume thru the course of a year, assuming they were working half of the year?

There are lots of variables to consider, I know. Size of horse. Yield of hay this year. Grain supplements......and so on.

What I'm looking for is, as we all talk to folks about the transition from horse to tractor in the field, one of the selling points was that you don't have to feed a tractor while it is sitting in the barn. Also, the piece of property that USED to be used for growing horse "fuel", could now grow cash crop. I'm just trying to generally understand this amount of land per horse.

Thoughts ?

Pete

An average 1100 lb horse can consume 30 lbs/day and ?walk down? another 30 lbs/day. They aren?t the most efficient grazers. They are classified as spot grazers.

My grand father explained that the horses were fed, not grazed. Hay was a part, but grains and feed was maybe the other 1/2. Cows were on the pasture summers, and fed silage winters. So real estimates (from my listening) is I remember my uncle's saddle horses taking 10 acres or so each. (all baled not grazed) Jim

Horses vary hugely between breeds. My arabian hardly eats any hay, while I had a haflinger that chewed through a round bale in two days! We'd left it in the lot for when we were on vacation. (Whoops.) My arabian, which is my road horse, barely eats two slabs of hay a day--and that has to be pure alfalfa or he won't touch it at all. The haflinger is from a northern climate and was bred for filling up on grass, so they have big stomaches to fuel them all day long as it digests. Same with other work horses. The arabian was bred in a desert where there is no grass to fill up big stomaches, so they eat richer food like dates, figs and alfalfa. I've even heard of feeding them dried meat! My arab eats grain, beat pulp, wheat sprouts, oatmeal and anything but grass. It has to be rich food, because he's lean. So that breed won't chew through a haymow like a workhorse will.

You can expect two bales a day stuffed into a workhorse. If you're feeding 50 pound bales and your hayfield's making 4 tons an acre, that's about 2.3 acres to feed one horse. A team of six would be almost fourteen acres. Add in the grain, and on a 40 acre farm, you're looking at close to half your land just to feed your hungry helpers. On the other hand, if you have waste ground that can't be tilled but can be pastured effectively, horse power is more economical.

Joel

I did my math wrong. Two 50 pound bales is 4.5 acres per horse and 27 acres for a team of six. (Gosh, I hope I got it right this time.)

Okay, someone needs to check up on me.

j

If feeding a concentrate, when we balance rations we will calculate 1.5 to 2.5% of body weight fed as roughage, of course it also depends on the production function of the individual. If no concentrate is fed, may go as high as 3-4% . With increased demands there is an obvious increase in digestible energy inputs. You also need to calculate the megacalories of Digestble Energy in whatever roughage your feeding. Alfalfa?s caloric content will be considerably higher than that of the grass hays. And with that increase be careful feeding leafy alfalfa as digestive disturbances will happen.

Keep in mid the seasons too. Grass grows very well here in April May June but usually slows dramatically in July and August.

You have not even begun to consider the variables.

A tractor is faster than a horse.
A tractor does not need a break.
The farmer needs less breaks sitting on a tractor than walking behind a horse.
So one farmer can cover more ground in a day with a tractor.

Then we consider mules are better for small farms than a horse because they eat less and can survive on less digestible, more fibrous pasture.
Then we consider a cow could be pastured with the mule reducing the cost of the mule.

Now we look at the tractor need gasoline; oil changes; and maintenance; so you need to figure how many cash crop acres are needed to cover that cost.

So while you may gain 10% of land to grow crops on a 20 to 40 acre farm by getting rid of the mule and buying a tractor the cost is offset by the tractor maintenance.
The cost savings in the tractor come with more land covered in a day so a bigger farm was possible for one man.

One last thought. There are no 50 year old horses. Jim

Depends on your climate but here 1/4 of the tillable acres was used to grow hay and oats for the work horses to consume. That fed them through logging in the winter too.

My great grandfather farmed about 10-15 miles SW of the big Mack. My dad was fond of telling about how granddad farmed 600+ acres for decades until he bought a tractor. Dad just loved spending his summers as a kid on that farm. Said granddad liked the tractor so much he promptly bought another one the next year and retired the draft horses. Not sure if he had two or four, and I don't know the breed but they were huge especially to a 5 year old pup. Heck the John Deere tractors looked big to me back then. Anyway dad always said that granddad stopped farming 200 of them acres after he sold the horses off. Sadly, even though I remember that they were John Deere's I can't for the life of me remember what models they were. I like to think since one was slightly bigger that they were an "A" and a "B" but then it could have been a "B" and an "H".
Just nobody left that would know.

JD

Somewhere between 5 and 50.

(quoted from post at 11:03:18 08/01/19) One last thought. There are no 50 year old horses. Jim

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True, but there has never been a tractor that got better with a little rest and there has never, ever been a tractor that produced another little tractor every year for 15 or more years.

Lets remember that selling points were just that- sales talk. True, horses did eat hay and grains off the farm, but the tractors fuel had to be bought with $$$ that was already tight. True, tractors were faster and didn't need to rest as often, but horses almost never get stuck, have flats or their points needing replacement. The argument goes both ways.

In the end, what the tractor did is keep a lot of horses from being abused by owners that weren't "horse wise". Any idiot can drive a tractor. The same idiot can abuse and kill a willing work horse.

There are some days I'd prefer the horses, others the tractor.