Horse Powered Market Gardening Economics
Case Study: Beech Grove Farm

In every other respect, our horse chores are pretty inefficient. During the winter I make four trips to the barn for three feedings of hay, rearranging the bedding in the stalls and turning the horses out to pasture for six to eight hours a day. I also spend 10 minutes each day sprouting their daily ration of oats and barley to improve the digestibility of these certified organic whole grains for the older horses.

Daily horse maintenance is less time consuming in the spring, summer and fall when the horses are stabled during the day and pastured overnight for twelve to sixteen hours. However, this s avings in labor is more than offset by the time required for moving fence and mowing our super-sized horse pasture. Depending on the growing conditions, we use eighteen to twenty-five acres of the better grassland for year-round grazing. The payoff for pasture maintenance is a much reduced hay bill. We can get away with fewer than 250 bales a year for our four 1,400-1,800 pound animals.

On the other hand, we spend a lot of time and money on bedding the horses, going through 250 to 300 bales a year of oat straw and a bare minimum of 24 bales of peat moss. Our goal is to capture all of the manure and urine in the horses' straight stalls and bulk up those precious nutrients for composting with heavy hogs. As a result, we have been able to maintain soil fertility in the market garden with the manure from four large animals plus small quantities of rock minerals and lots of cover crops. The extra attention to bedding also keeps the horses remarkably clean, eliminating the need for grooming.

The following are some of the insights I have gained from participating in this horse accounting project:

Judging from the other farms in the study, we could eliminate our hay bill altogether if we shifted the labor and fertilizer we invest in our extra-extensive pasture to putting up hay for the horses. We have been reluctant to close this gap in self-sufficiency because making horse hay in late June and early July could create a labor crunch when we are already super busy picking strawberries, lettuce, spinach and peas, plus preparing the fields for planting fall vegetables. Pasture maintenance, by contrast, can be spread over the whole growing season as time permits.

Putting a stopwatch on horse maintenance also showed us that taking care of four animals versus just the three horses used for farm work only adds a couple of minutes to daily chores. From a labor perspective, keeping a fourth animal just for manure production turns out to be fairly economical.

However, tracking horse expenses made it clear that out-of-pocket costs for stabling a non-working member of the herd really adds to the expense of the compost. Consequently, we are trying out different manure management systems and compost application rates to see if we can maintain fertility in the market garden with the manure from the three work horses.

Another surprise was finding out that my teamster hours were remarkably similar over the two years of the study (455 hours in 2010, 457 in 2011) despite using a single horse for half of the heavy fieldwork this past year. I think this consistency in teamster hours suggests that 450 hours is about the maximum amount of time I can dedicate to working the horses during the growing season and that I can accomplish the fieldwork more efficiently when necessary. It also means I have the pleasure of spending a quarter of my farm hours with the horses.

One consequence of using a single horse in 2011 was a one third reduction in horse hours compared to 2010, significantly increasing the cost per horse hour (from $2.91/ hour to $5.76/hour) and the ratio of horse maintenance to horse work (35% to 54%). Ironically, what seemed like an improvement in work horse efficiency by going single makes live horsepower look more expensive and labor intensive on our farm. In this respect, teamster hours might provide a better measure for work horse efficiency and productivity than horse hours. Our horse costs per teamster hour were much more similar between the two years ($5.63/hour versus $7.60/hour) despite an $800 increase in horse expenses in 2011, and the ratio of horse maintenance labor to teamster hours was virtually identical (69 percent).

Either way, the high number of teamster and horse hours on our farm was not a big surprise. After all, our original goal was to use the horses in the market garden as much as possible. The recordkeeping, however, gave me a much better picture of how all those hours were allocated. For example, I had no idea that I spent a quarter of my teamster time sitting on the riding cultivator, primarily for nontraditional purposes, like under-cutting cover crops, managing living mulches in the vegetables, minimum till planting, and forming or renovating the single row beds. Only a handful of those cultivator hours were devoted to weed control.

Tracking horse hours also underscored how much time I spend on preserving soil moisture, reducing weed pressure, and establishing/managing the cover crops as reflected in the large number of hours dedicated to secondary tillage. From a business standpoint, I am not sure whether these extra passes over the fields should be written off as recreational tillage or considered a boost to the bottom line in the savings of labor for weed control, irrigating, etc.