I had an old friend who passed a while ago tell me he was working for a guy west of Turlock in 1932 driving 2 poor skinny horses on disk with a seat, he said the horses were too darn poor for him to ride so he walked behind them. he said to me “ I told myself I bet this is as good as it ever get for me”  1932 was about a low point for the depression.  It did get better for him he retired farming several hundred acres  his main power being a CAT. RD7 and not following 2 poor horses!!    17afarmer

Sorry for your loss 17AFarmer. I am sure he had his share of rough times and likely some fantastic years leading up the the purchase of his crawler.
Like many of us, we never knew why our folks did things a certain way. Dad would always order his barefoot trees from a small Italian nurseryman. We always asked why he didn’t buy from a larger, local supplier; turns out they used to share a horse early on in their days of farming! We never had a clue…story was my dad couldn’t kick start that old nag one day(even poking at it with a pitchfork), gave up on the single horsepower and they decided to buy an Oliver crawler instead! JM

I actually have a little horse driving experience, My dad, grandad, and uncles were all old horse and mule guys. As a kid I spent ALOT of time with them they would all be 104 to 115 —— 135 now and all had the stories to tell and were a wealth of information on hooking and driving teams including jerk line long teams. When I was in high school my dad and I pulled teams of ponies in the pulling contests later on I bought a team of big horses to play with and I pulled them in the pulling contest never won but boy did I have a lot of Fun! The older generation was sill involved in pulling, all of them my dads age was fun and you got to learn from people that had actually done this for a living! I had my horses for fun but I can appreciate some of what our parents went thru , most of it was not Fun but a hell of a lot of hard work!! If you started early and worked late with 2 horses and a walking plow you maybe got 2 acres. 17afarmer

When I was growing up in the high plains, Mom always insisted that Dad plow the garden with horses as she thought a tractor and plow would pack the ground too much.  We always had a large garden, so we kept horses around until I was out of high school.  When I was 4 and my brother would have been 3 we went with Dad to the pasture to get the horses to plow the garden.  (Barney and Maude) The horses were at the east end of the pasture about ½ mile from the farmstead.  Dad had just bridled the horses to lead them back to the farm when one of the horses started acting up and it was because of not one but two rattle snakes about 20 ft from the horses.I can remember Dad leading the horses and my brother and I about 20 yards from the snakes and we held the reins of those “huge” workhorses while Dad dispensed the rattlers.  He found an old barrel hoop nearby and that was what he used to kill the snakes.  My most vivid memory or the ordeal was when we got back to the house and Mom found out my brother and I were holding the reins of the horses while dad killed the rattlers!  She must have chewed on Dad for several minutes for “endangering” our lives holding the horses while there were snakes around.  It only happened once.