The history of farming with horses in Franklin and Hardin Counties in Iowa, USA. Filmed at the Franklin County Fair in Hampton, Iowa USA on July 14 and 15, 2023.
Using real horsepower (like I have done the past 60 years) is based on what the soil produces with the help of the sun and therefore can be considered a form of solar power. I always surprise visitors to our farm by saying that we run on solar power. When they want to see the pertinent facilities I point them to our horse barn. While working for humans did not just mean being cared for and loved, but also meant much hardship and even often abuse for horses, it was based on biological reality. With the advent of extraction of fossil fuel utilized in tractors and cars humans thought they wouldn't be bound by those biological realities and started exploiting the land to a much greater extent than ever before. Monocultures resulted in soil loss, pollution of soil and water. Worst of all, we forgot that the earth sets boundaries for how many people it can support. In my lifetime the population of the USA more than doubled, the one of the planet more than tripled. Therefore we have been depleting the earth's capital and anybody should understand that this cannot go on without being penalized by natural consequences. The writing is on the wall. The signs are all around us.
@@VoicesOfIowaFalls I should have also mentioned that as the numbers of existing farms suggest replacing horses with tractors led to a rapid decline in the number of farms, which means that not only places to live at were lost but the number of independent small businesses in the farming regions shrank considerably as well.
