Tractors were developed to be mechanical horses. Ok, they were developed to be better than the horses that they replaced. While the mighty draft horse was a good right hand man for farmers spanning the millennia, they required food, rest, housing, care, shoes, and they had a bad habit of aging and dying as well. The mechanical tractor took care of many issues associated with using horses to to the job in the fields (but not all, they still died). That being said, we have an interesting video for you to cruise here. You are going to watch a vintage tractor hooked to a pulling sled and then you are going to watch a team of 16 beefy Belgian draft horses pull the same sled. Which do you think will do the better job?
Get a load of these animals when they come clopping by the camera. They are like the jacked-up body builders of the horse world. They are literally all muscle and when worked in a group…just wow. While we cannot say that we’re real nature freaks around here, this video gives us an appreciation for what genetics, breeding, and selectively tailoring ma nature for use in a specific job can do. Wow!
Interesting video that demonstrates that (not widley known) the max output of a single horse is actually about 15 horsepower! This highlights that the official term for 1 horsepower (coined by James Watt) is actually a result of his experimentation with “good cart horses who were found on average to lift a weight that is equal to 352 cu ft of water (roughly 8.8 tons) to the height of 1 ft in 1 minute and sustain this over an 8 hour day”