You can certainly raise enough to sell in an area small enough to be manageable to work with horses. I didn’t have a tractor at all when I owned my farm. And I pulled more $ out than my friends that have agro-factory sized operations. We raised lovingly raised and butchered 25 turkeys one year for Thanksgiving. We pulled a bigger profit than my friend that owns two turkey houses that hold 100,000 turkeys each. Difference was that I had no overhead while he has like $500K in heavy equipment loans. I used to grow enough in 1/4 acre of raised beds I made out of old fence boards to sell at 2 farmers markets a week and have leftovers.
Americans rely on tractors because we have more open land and thus larger farms. Europeans still rely on traditional means because they tend to farm smaller areas with more challenging topography. A few summers ago, I got it in my head that I would try to hay by hand to feed the goats over the winter. My hands are small and the safety triggers on power tools give me tendonitis. I replaced my weed eater with a really good scythe several years ago and never went back. Our property was large enough to hay with a tractor. But the county was so rocky that it’s damn near impossible to get anyone to hay less than 50 acres because it’s not worth it to them to risk damage to their equipment for basically no profit.
Anyway, out went this crazy lady armed with her scythe and plans for building hay drying racks out of scrap wood she’d found on Google. It worked! And it was pretty awesome. If I got busy and it rained and ruined my cut windrows I didn’t feel guilty because it wasn’t a huge area. You can time around the weather and your schedule. When it was dry I stacked it on the racks to cure and then covered it. To feed, I uncovered one stack at a time. The kids helped and it got them out away from their cell phones. We all got exercise. We were able to winter the goats without buying any hay. And the fields benefited from being cut more frequently.
My dad grew up farming with mules out of necessity in Appalachia. It is fine if you want a Wendell Berryish hobby, but It is hard and dangerous if your livelihood depends on it. It sounds bucolic but reality is much different.
Of course it can be done, but whether it is cheaper these days is very dubious as a financial proposition. If you are just planning a couple acres you will be much better off buying a used gravely for a few hundred to till. Much less expensive than all you would need to farm with horses. Not to mention feeding the horses. you can get a small antique tractor certainly capable of this work for less than a team and harness.
I grew up farming by hand and with horses.
We sowed our wheat, oats and barley by hand from a towsack, we used sickles to swath them by hand, making bundles as we went, then used the horse and a sled to haul them to the farm house yard, laid the bundles open and had the horse pulling a log tresh the grain out of the straw, going around and around until the grain was loose.
Then pitchforking the straw into poles to make stacks, then sweeping the grain into towsacks to haul to the mill with the horse and wagon.
We would get back two sacks of milled wheat, now flour.
That is what we used to bake bread all year long, while fighting to keep away insects and worms, that also liked that flour.
We also had a very large garden and fields of green beans and pinto and lima beans and chickpeas we watered with ditches, weeded all summer long, then harvested, all by hand, everyone helping.
Potatoes also, try digging them out by hand and putting them in towsacks you drag along, until it gets too heavy, leave it there and start with another sack, etc.
We also had olives, almonds, pecans, chestnuts we harvested and sold to the store in town.
Some olives we pickled, others we ran by the press and that was our olive oil, for as long as it lasted until it was getting rancid.
We swathed hay with scintes and hung it in wood stands to dry, then hauled it with the horse and wagon to add to the stacks of straw to feed in the winter.
We milked our five cows, fed two pigs until slaughter at six months, then raised two more.
We had six goats we hand grazed, about two dozen rabbits and chickes, of course, that we sold to the store and a restaurant.
There were three farms an families in our clearing in the mountains.
We had one older horse and a young mule and helped each other.
One family was an older couple that were sick.
The mule was theirs.
We took care of them and their things and they rarely were able to help.
That is the way things were done then, you do what you can and pitch in where you are needed.
Maybe that sounds very bucolic, how nice to care for land and animals and people.
The reality is, that kind of life, day after day, week, month, years going by, is what our modern life has freed us from.
Just as you would not like to spend your whole life as a handyman/groom cleaning horse stalls and mowing and repairing fences, not everyone wants to spend their life farming by hand. digging every one potato out of the ground and dragging that towsack along behind you and with not enough hours in the day to get all done that needs to be done, for their whole lives.
When someone tells me they farmed the old way for a bit and how great it was, I ask if they also lived in a house without running water, electricity, with an outhouse, away from any modern conveniences, depending on what they could raise or make only, not traveling anywhere, no other in their lives but their work and knowing that was going to be all they would have for the rest of their lives.
There really was not a world out there waiting for them if they decided to do other, changed their mind, that kind of life is all they knew.
Nope, they loved it while they did it, then quickly found reasons to do other than keep farming like that.
Unless they were Amish and that restricted world was what they wanted out of their life for them and their families.
That we learned to farm commercially is one reason we even have the world we have today, where a few can feed so many, that then can do other with their lives, including farming the old way, if they so choose.
With Bluey and Fordtractor, the “good old days” were grueling work every day of summer. Thank goodness for improvements in machines and methods of modern farming. Improved wages to support the gentleman farmer’s horses as a hobby!! Nice now having choices for those that wish to work horses that way, most of us do not. I love having a tractor to pull loads, empty rhe spreader daily. No WAY do I want to go back to hand haying! It is hard enough moving small bales to stack the winters supply of hay in the barn.
My horses are for fun, ridden or driven, not just muscle to work loads or plow.
I have been poor, had to do all my horse chores by hand and muscle. Never going back to that. I can say I did it, but sure do not miss any part of it! My Grampa farmed with horses, crippled him up, aged him before his time. Nothing he missed about it after he got a tractor. He still had horses, used them for riding and driving, not farming anymore.
Check out DAP.net (Draft animal power network) it has a website, but it is now most active on Facebook.
There are a few people who farm using draft animals. Generally small organic farms producing premium produce in tight spaces (you can plow with a horse in a high tunnel and turn at the end!)
A few others log with horses. The niche market, and it is a niche market, is low impact logging of high end (think veneer quality) lumber on lots that are too small to pay to move modern logging equipment to. So your 10 to 40 acre lot, well managed wood lot, with an owner that doesn’t want it to look like anything happened at the end of the log job and isn’t worried about the production market. Not exactly the most common job out there!
It is a Hard way to earn money, and most I know have side incomes or spousal incomes to supplement. It is also even more of a lifestyle choice than either farming or horses alone are.
On the other hand, the silence in the woods with just a team of horses skidding a load rather than a big forwarder…awfully nice.
