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“...including to bring your products to market, to round up your animals, to buy equipment and supplies, etc.” No... Farmers didn’t bring their products to mar

“...including to bring your products to market, to round up your animals, to buy equipment and supplies, etc.” No... Farmers didn’t bring their products to market unless they were running a plantation, ie they were very large operators, which were few and far between and would certainly nit having been riding a bicycle - those guys would be going in a nice two horse cart. The small guys sold to a local buyer who handled the shipping. Part of the reason for this is that the products you produced for sale were very bulky. A tobacco bale could be over half a ton; similar for cotton. Bulk grains and beans weren’t as likely to be sold to distant buyers, but they too are too bulky to carry by bicycle. I round up animals on a daily basis. A bicycle is worse than useless for this purpose. Which is why farmers don’t use them for rounding up animals today. Shopping was done at most a few times a year. You rode your horse (or mule or donkey - see below) to the general store. Often, salesman came to you, specifically because you weren’t going to town much. So you’d have traveling brush salesmen - or pots and pans salesmen, traveling patent medicine salesmen, tinkers and ferriers. When you went to town, the kinds of things you were buying were usually too bulky to carry by bike. You didn’t go to town to buy a shirt or two. You went to buy a plow, or if you had a good year some china. Popping in to town on a nike would have been a very niche use case. Also, you weren’t buying very much equipment. What you couldn’t make yourself you had the local blacksmith make for you. There’s very little on an 1850s American farm that wasn’t locally produced. “Only a successful farmer could afford a horse.” Err... no... Not in the US anyway. In order to farm you had to plow and in order to plow you had to have a draft animal. That wasn’t always a horse, in some cases it was a mule or donkey, or sometimes in the west an ox. And all of those animals were also used for transport. Granted nobody rode oxen but they often pulled wagons, hence the term “oxcart”. There was a term used coined after the Civil War: “40 acres and a mule”. It comes from field orders issued by Union General William “Tecumseh” Sherman with the approval of Abraham Lincoln, and it redistributed white property to newly freed slaves. The idea was that the slaves needed at minimum those two things to be self supporting. But in any case, you’ve got the order wrong. You didn’t buy a horse (or a mule) once you became a successful farmer. You bought a horse in order to become a successful farmer, in much the same way that the successful programmer today will own a (or will have an employer-provided) computer. It was an essential piece of equipment.

runarberg 7y ago
We might both be guilty of over generalizing. Farming practices differ very widely across cultures and time. Farming in post colonial America was often done on big areas of land that was often handed out for free (or very cheap) and the markets were far away. This is in contrast to farming where land was scarce and small and a the markets relatively close (2 hours walking). In the latter case bringing a freshly slaughtered goat, a couple of basket worth of grain, or textiles, to town three days a week, and sell in a public market is not uncommon. In the former case it is unthinkable. In the case of rounding up animals I can see bicycle being quite useful if you have a small stock that you grace in large swaths of shared uninhabited lands. At the start of the gracing season you might not use the bicycle, but during the gracing season you might need to move them from one area to another, then it is definitely handy to be able to bike to the first area, herd them to the next one, walk back, and bike home. Note that neither of my examples were ever common in post colonial America, but quite common throughout Europe and are still common in sub Saharan Africa.
- GlenTheMachine 7y ago
  I fully concede that conditions were very different depending on time and place, and I was talking specifically about the US (mostly the eastern US, where I’m from) in the period after independence up to World War I.
bluGill 7y ago
By the 1850s the local blacksmith was making nothing. The industrial revolution was in full force "back east". Factories could make and ship product cheaper than the local blacksmith. The local blacksmith was a repair shop (after the car they almost all became mechanics) and fine tuning to fit. Before the industrial revolution there were very few blacksmiths, you made it yourself on the farm or did without.

runarberg 7y ago

We might both be guilty of over generalizing. Farming practices differ very widely across cultures and time. Farming in post colonial America was often done on big areas of land that was often handed out for free (or very cheap) and the markets were far away. This is in contrast to farming where land was scarce and small and a the markets relatively close (2 hours walking). In the latter case bringing a freshly slaughtered goat, a couple of basket worth of grain, or textiles, to town three days a week, and sell in a public market is not uncommon. In the former case it is unthinkable. In the case of rounding up animals I can see bicycle being quite useful if you have a small stock that you grace in large swaths of shared uninhabited lands. At the start of the gracing season you might not use the bicycle, but during the gracing season you might need to move them from one area to another, then it is definitely handy to be able to bike to the first area, herd them to the next one, walk back, and bike home. Note that neither of my examples were ever common in post colonial America, but quite common throughout Europe and are still common in sub Saharan Africa.

GlenTheMachine 7y ago
I fully concede that conditions were very different depending on time and place, and I was talking specifically about the US (mostly the eastern US, where I’m from) in the period after independence up to World War I.

bluGill 7y ago

By the 1850s the local blacksmith was making nothing. The industrial revolution was in full force "back east". Factories could make and ship product cheaper than the local blacksmith. The local blacksmith was a repair shop (after the car they almost all became mechanics) and fine tuning to fit. Before the industrial revolution there were very few blacksmiths, you made it yourself on the farm or did without.