For centuries, English bakers’ biggest customers were horses
atlasobscura.com
atlasobscura.com
Worth pointing out that both grain crops and the processing thereof have changed significantly in recent centuries, resulting in a tastier (and generally more nutritious, in the case of whole grains) product. Wholemeal flour used for horse bread would have probably been lower both in protein and digestible carbohydrates right from the start, and that's before accounting for indigestible grit and chaff left in it from the grinding process. Grinding was also less consistent, which further degraded the texture of the finished loaf. The exact same ingredients on paper are fundamentally different today than they were in the past -- sometimes for better, sometimes for worse.
It is possible to make flour without this problem? Almost certainly! But this n=1 anecdote demonstrates it’s a thing that can happen.
But its attached to Horses only, not Buffalo, Cow, Donkey etc.
@GP: Photos? A press article? More details? Why donkeys and not mules?
I can’t find anything about the bread - I’ve tried searching previously - it’s just a thing people do here, and always have. There’s a lot of that sort of thing, here. Thankfully there are some efforts going on to chronicle this stuff before the old folks all die - amateur historical society taking recordings etc. which is better than nothing, and I saunter about with a camera. They still have a forge in a nearby monastic village, powered by water-bellows - and it’s not a novelty, it’s where you go for scythes, machetes, etc. The watermills for grain worked until the 90’s, and were then abandoned - we live in one now.
The local breed is “Mirandese” - to be clear, most folks these days have abandoned the awkward old (usually on public land, wildcat) hillside groves, but the ones which are still worked, usually by elderly farmers, are donkey powered. The village near us, there are only three (actually, four now) donkeys, two of them work - but they all munch the pao de burro. Hunting and transhumance with dogs is also a big thing here, and I’m 99% sure it’s the same stuff I see shepherds giving their dogs.
Wikipedia has a bit on the breed: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burro_de_Miranda
Anecdote time: When I was young, we usually went during the holidays to a house of my grandparents that was 1km away from a small town (1k habitants) that was 15 km away from the capital city of a small province in the north west of Argentina. Only well water. We bought raw milk that we had to boil (and skim) before drinking. The road was fine, but during the summer that is rainy season you may get flooding in some parts. (Now the road is much better and it feels like a highway.) https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yala I'm not sure if they had/have a newspaper.
Here in Argentina, many stories about the independence war have mules because "they are better in mountain terrain". Reading some material a few years later, IIRC there where big transport business from Argentina to Bolivia/Peru and Chile that have mule breading facilities. If you have a big transport business or military operation, it makes sense to separate your breeding animals and have specialize work animal. But if you are a farmer with only a few animals, you can't do that.
Donkeys?
Loyal.
Seems like it'd sort of be like the rocket equation, but more forgiving.
The same law applies to global fuel transport: can you export oil halfway around the planet, on a boat that itself runs on oil? There's a rocket equation hidden in that. But the constants are really good (oil is energy-dense; planets are small); so it's not an important law that's ever-present in economics, in the way the rocket equation is ever-present in space. (Was it ever, in history?)
I read a short story once about a world where oceans were too large for oil-powered ships to cross. Anyone know which story I'm thinking of? It was an impossibly large planet too vast for humans to comprehend, and we could only just scratch the surface exploring small corners of it. I remember it had nuclear-powered ekranoplans.
Not for oil-powered boats, but for coal-powered steamboats, cargo size taken by coal was a significant factor. Significant enough that sail boats where still the way to get to New Zealand long after coal-power became ubiquitous.
Oh yeah, the current situation is highly abnormal.
With one giant exception : wind-powered ships do not suffer from this issue !
https://acoup.blog/2020/08/21/collections-bread-how-did-they...
https://i0.wp.com/acoup.blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/orbi...
> Using the figures from the Price Edict of Diocletian, we tend to estimate that river transport was five times cheaper than land transport, and sea-transport was twenty times cheaper than land transport.
(Not sure if that river transport of bulk grains was mostly by boats or by barges pulled by pack animals ?)
In fact, Rome itself not only got started as a cross-roads/waterways/seaways (large enough river for big sea ships to go up) for people to gather and trade, it could never have reached its ancient size of 0.5-1 M people without sea shipping !
Mayan city states were limited in size to how far warriors and their servants could march carrying their own food. No pack animals.
Your caravan has a max range of N days; you instead go N/3 days, drop 1/3 of your supplies, and then return. Do that twice.
For your third trip, you can load up your caravan, travel N/3 days to your supply dump, and reload using half the cached supplies. Now you travel another N/3 days, drop 1/3 of your load, and then return, stopping for the cached supplies again on the return.
You still consume increasing amounts of resources, but unlike rockets or boats you don't have to carry them all from the start.
Perhaps Water + People over Oceans. More sails --> More people --> More water --> Bigger boat --> More sails, etc etc.
OK are we talking a Mustang or a Shire or Clydesdale? Carrying the food or dragging a wagon?
I don't know enough about horses but a heavy horse (Shirehorse, Suffolk Punch or Clydesdale in the UK) can drag quite a decent load. Granddad's Clydesdale "Damson" could make a furrow with a plough all day, back in the day - bloody hard work. Ironically, that was in Devon - Scottish horse in Shire land! He got a Ferguson tractor later but they kept the horses as well.
I think we would run out of UK for a single horse load unless doing the full Land's End to John o'Groats (or trying to cross the Irish Sea) but a bigger land might need a re-fuel or two.
A heavy horse also needs to eat a lot more than a normal horse.
My father, born in 1930 in Minnesota, told of watching farmers bringing out a team of horses to help pull stuck tractors out of the springtime mud -- it wasn't only about their not-insignificant strength, but their superior traction. In his teens -- which would have been in the forties, he worked with teams of horses, which seems oddly late in the 20th century, but he did, as did my paternal grandfather. The terms for the various parts of the, to me, very-complicated-looking harnesses were as fresh in his mind in his eighties as they had been in his teens.
Now, can our nag drag enough fodder to do the job? I suggest yes.
But the question here is how far the horse can go on a single load of food. We're purely trying to convert food into work via the horse.
And if you assume that the conversion of potential energy stored in the food to actual energy produced by the horse is less than perfectly efficient, then it will always be better to avoid doing work than to try to make up for doing extra work by starting with more food. That would be true even if starting with more food didn't require doing even more extra work to move the extra food.
Improvements in strength aren't helpful to this problem; what you need is higher efficiency.
If we assume a spherical horse, we can also assume lack of friction.
Then for about 50% of the mountainous part, the horse can just roll downhill not even using any of its precious fat!
He also pointed to Wayne E. Lee's article on grass as a limiting factor in Mongol warfare, which I found very interesting: https://www.historynet.com/mongols-on-the-march-the-logistic...
That was the very first thing I thought of when I read this article about horse bread.
If you had those horses in the middle ages your army would be insane.
Even if you just put two 10kg bags of oats in your backpack, that's going to last.
20kg? Soldiers have that much to carry, and often more, with weight of gun, ammo, rations, bedroll, and more... yet march day long.
(Yes I have carried a 95lb pack on 2week mountaineering expeditions)
There’s a lot of variables though!
A far cry from 35C, as another option.
35C, you'd almost have to factor in the weight of salt you'd take on a month's trip.
EDIT: Oops! Should have read farther in the comments. FartyMcFarter already mentioned Huskies just a couple of comments down.
This podcast about the nutrition and planning for an unsupported 100 day crossing of Antarctica was absolutely fascinating but somehow felt nearly useless in terms of things to apply to my own (far far less substantial) trips. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/keto-2700-km-through-a...
>in practice about a month and a half’s logistics buffer is the maximum that’s possible and even doing that is expensive.
My first paragraph is about a man, a backpack, and a little cart behind him ... to carry food.
My last paragraph has nothing to do with food, only to show that a man can march with full kit, all day with 40kg. That it is done all the time.
You response mixes the two, and then replies with a quote about an army, which must drag a full kit and food too.
It is not applicable to this thread...
If you can carry enough food for X days, you could travel out X/4 days, leave a cache with enough supplies for X/2 days, then travel back with the last X/4 days of supplies. During the actual push, take X/4 from the cache on your way out, and X/4 from the cache on your way back. By using the cache, your range has increased from 0.5X to 0.75X. (This is a simplified example that assumes only a single cache of supplies is being used, and that the same size party is used for both trips.)
More extreme resource planning can also be used for expeditions, though can raise questions of ethics. The first successful expedition to the South Pole [0] set off with 52 sled-dogs, 45 of which survived the first month of the expedition. At that point, the supplies were light enough that they only required 18 dogs for the final push. The remainder were killed and butchered, both to reduce the number of mouths to feed and to provide food for the humans and remaining dogs.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amundsen%27s_South_Pole_expedi...
On the use of dogs as an expendable resource, Scott said "One cannot calmly contemplate the murder of animals which possess such intelligence and individuality, which have frequently such endearing qualities, and which very possibly one has learnt to regard as friends and companions.", poor guy. Quite the gentleman.
(As an aside, he did pioneer the use of motor sleds for antarctic expeditions, but that was a disaster for him too.)
Ha! Good luck. Horses are masters at sneaking a graze wherever and whenever, the instant you stop paying attention.
You're absolutely right:
https://acoup.blog/2022/07/15/collections-logistics-how-did-...
> The problem in a nutshell is that anything available to these armies prior to the advent of the railroad that can carry food, also eats food (except for boats, but rivers and coastlines may well not go where you want to go). We may call this problem the ‘tyranny of the wagon equation’ as a number of readers have noticed the similarity to the tyranny of the rocket equation.
If the horse eats 20lbs per day (as noted in the article), say it can barely pull 2000lbs on a good quality cart. So 100 days of food. Then just figure out how far it can go in 100 days.
In one day horses can go 80-160km, but they need rest after a few days of this. So say it can do 50km per day sustained and unweighted, 25km at high weight (early in the journey).
Split roughly in half into weight/unweighted days, we get a total distance of about 3,750km for a self-powered horse.
That's almost Lisbon to Moscow, or almost New York to Seattle.
Pulling a cart on level ground should allow for almost arbitrary weigh as shown by people pulling trains with their teeth etc. The most extreme version of this historically is horses pulling boats through canals, which could hit 50+ tons of cargo per horse across very long distances.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32239566
That earlier submission has the data.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32239566
Note how non-steppe horses were too big to subsist on grazing alone !
P.S.: Typically *less* forgiving because it's easier to dump parts of the rocket, especially for a return trip ?
Makes a lot of economic sense - what they don't mention is that horses can get energy from fibre, while people can't, so this is biologically efficient as well as economically.
I gave up shortly thereafter and returned to the glory of old trustworthy maltodextrin-enhanced, vitamin-enriched sliced white bread and found other equally unsuccessful hobbies for those extra 2 hours per day.
Only hard, dessicated bread can be given. But even that is not ideal.
Generally speaking, don't feed animals that are not yours, please :)
A horse raised with or adapted to a more varied diet will be a bit more robust. I've known a horse that was fond of sausage and stripped fruit trees and blackberry bushes at every opportunity, her digestive distress after those episodes was never that serious for her. Bystanders may have suffered some.
Ouch!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locomotive_Acts
>It has been claimed that the restrictions in the earlier act were advocated by those with interests in the UK railway industry and horse-drawn carriages.
>Now the small native ponies of the Steppe can subsist entirely off of grass, but the sort of horses available in the agrarian world are bred too big and strong to eat entirely grass. Their nutrition requirements are too high and so they require feed, at least some 4.5kg of it per day assuming local grass is available along with time to let the horses graze it (during which the wagon is, of course, stopped).
"In pre-industrial England, horses took the place of cars, trucks, and trains."
That sounds weirdly Time's Arrow ...
very interesting