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 basically are 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 b.u.mps. 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 conductive to a rapid adaptation of mechanization. On the more conductive 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 r.e.t.a.r.d 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 by-pa.s.s 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 knowledgeand 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 fortractors 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 non-steam 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 sc.r.a.p 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 gangplowor seeder and has a team of horses. .h.i.tched 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 a.s.sociated 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 mechanicalseeders, 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 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 again. 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 handbind the wheat, eliminating one of the most labor intensive and back-breaking 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 ma.s.sive 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 remember 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 findhimself 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 alsoarise 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 aboveremain 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 horsedrawn 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 or5-6 man-hours per bushelfor 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 farmerslearn to do their own maintenance. Some time in the decade of the 1640s, I can see the development of traveling mechanicswho 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 astart 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 b.u.t.ter 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 caneither 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 ma.s.ses 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 worksbetter 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.
Appendix 1: A Single Day"s Work a.s.suming a well-conditioned team, equipment in good repair and 10 hours in the field, with two 1,500-pound horses, in one day you can expect to: Plow1.5-2 acres Cultivate (single row) 7 acres Harrow8-10 acres Mow7 acres Seed drill8-10 acres Rake14 acres Plant8-10 acres Haul on a wagon1.5 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 lbs, three horses may be needed to accomplish the same amount of work.
Appendix 2: Team and Manpower Requirements
These requirements a.s.sume modern sized draft horses of 15.5 to 16 hh and 1,400 to 1,600 lbs. 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.
One bottom wooden plow: Oxen team of 2-8 oxen, 1 oxen driver, 1 person to handle the plow Walking plow: Horse team of 1-2 horses, 1 driver/plow handler Sulky plow, two bottom: Horse team of 2-4 horses, 1 driver Sulky plow, four bottom: Horse team of 3-8 horses, 1 driver Drag harrow: Horse team of 1-2 horses, 1 driver Disc harrow: Horse team of 4-8 horses, 1 driver Seed drill: Horse team of 2 horses, 1 driver Two row corn planter: Horse team of 2 horses, 1 driver Hay mower: Horse team of 2-4 horses, 1 driver/operatorBuckrake: Horse team of 2-4 horses, 1 driver/operator Stationary hay baler (200-250 lb. 3 wire bales): 2 horse driven treadmill or sweep Stationary hay baler (125-150 lb. 3 wire bales): Tractor belt driven Wooden pull grader (or snow plow): Horse team of 4-6 horses, 1 driver Grain binder: Horse team of 3-5 horses, 1 driver/operator Bundle wagons (carrying shocks to thresher): Horse team of 2 horses, 1 driver Farm wagon (hauling sacks of grain): 6 horse team, 1 driver Spring wagon (light hauling): Horse team of 2 horses, 1 driver Manure spreader: Horse team of 2 horses, 1 driver
Bibliography
The Horse in the Middle Ages Ann Hyland Sutton Publishing Limited 1999 (Hardback) ISBN 0-7509-1067-4.
Horse Breeding in the Medieval World Charles Gladitz Four Courts Press,Dublin 1997 (Hardback) ISBN 1-85182-270-4.
The Draft Horse Primer Maurice Telleen Draft Horse Journal, Inc 1977 (Paperback) ISBN 0-9629076-1-8.
Horses, Oxen and TechnologicalInnovation JohnLangdon CambridgeUniversityPress,Cambridge 1986.
ISBN 0 521 52508X.
On-Line References
Recommended site to start with- lots of good information on four-legged farming 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 ill.u.s.trations from the nineteenth century to explain how things work Lots of good stuff and pictures of modern farming and logging with horses.
Pictures of many horse-drawn implements fromSouthwestMissouriStateUniversity Pictures of an Estonian farm whose buildings are similar to those ofGermany in the seventeenth century.
CanadianMuseumof Technology- one should read this entire marvelous site.
An "everything you ever wanted to know about farming" site
Information on Granges and their development in theUSA
Flint"s Lock
Part one of a series devoted to firearms in the 1632 universe.
By Leonard Hollar, Bob Hollingsworth, Tom Van Natta and John Zeek
Editor"s note:
The "Grantville Firearms Roundtable" is a group of experts on firearms whom I asked to develop a series of articles for the Grantville Gazette on the issue of firearms as it bears on the series. Themember are Leonard Hollar, Bob Hollingsworth, John Rigby, Tom Van Natta and John Zeek. Rick Boatright edited the article.
In1633 Eric Flint and David Weber give us our first glimpse at the type of firearm Grantville introduced to arm its allies. Many fans of the series were surprised that more advanced weaponry was not produced. To better understand why a muzzle loading flintlock rifle was chosen, rather than the pet design of every fan, requires a look at many problems faced by the Grantvillers and their understanding of those problems. What weapons would they face on a 1633 battlefield? What materials were available?
What thought might have gone into developing the features that are to be found on the weapon now called the SRG?
To understand the reasoning behind the adoption of a flintlock rifle, when other designs are available, requires starting with a brief discussion of the weaponry arrayed against Grantville when the town was dropped into the middle of the Thirty Years" War.
Most of the European army units had more men armed with pikes, long wooden poles with metal blades on the end, than men armed with firearms. These units were "Pike Heavy." The ratio of pikes to muskets was in flux and some units might have had as few as one pike per musket, but others might have had as many as four pikes to one musket.