Originally researched, authored and posted by Patricia Nell Warren on June 22, 2016.
HISTORIC HORSE-POWERED MOWING AT THE RANCH.
Yes, it’s "historic" because mowing hay was once done this way on the Grant-Kohrs Ranch. But this team and this piece of 19th-century machinery also represent a turning point in the history of agriculture. Once upon a time, “hay” was produced in relatively small amounts to provide a local supply of winter feed for local livestock. Across Europe and North America, grass was laboriously harvested the way it had been done since early times – by a cohort of workers on foot cutting it with scythes. At best, working at exhausting speed, a man might cut 1 acre of grass a day.
Not till the Industrial Revolution did inventors begin to puzzle out a faster, less laborious way of cutting hay. Starting in the early 1800s, they tinkered with a device that operated like a giant pair of scissors, powered by gears turned by the wheels of a modest machine ridden by a man driving a team or single horse. The result was the revolutionary cutter-bar shown in this photo. It could chew its way through as much as 30 acres of grass a day.
This advance was welcomed by Western stockraisers who had recognized the need to produce hay in industrial quantities. Conrad Kohrs and John Bielenberg were among those who realized, as they put ever larger herds onto Western rangelands, that cattle couldn’t always make it through winter on what the land naturally offered. It was vital to have supplemental feeding, especially during the hardest winters.
From this horse-powered cutter bar, the technology advanced to the 20th-century tractor-powered mower. As the livestock industry expanded, along with a growing population hungry for meat, hay-culture skyrocketed from local product to global industry.
Today hay still has to be mowed and cured before it can be stacked or baled, but it’s a billion-dollar business. It has joined grains and other plant crops as one of the world’s vital trading commodities. U.S. hay production varies from year to year because of the come and go of drought; in 2004 it peaked at 158,122 million tons. Montana ranks #7 among the nation’s top 10 hay-producing states. Overall, around 12% of our alfalfa-hay production, and 30% of our grassy-hay production, goes into container ships in west-coast ports, and from there into the export market, with Japan our leading buyer, along with other Asian countries.
(More info from "Alfalfa and Forage News" http://ucanr.edu/blogs/blogcore/postdetail.cfm?postnum=11947. Photo by National Park Service)