Discipline is a habit which has to be taught, to children as well as to horses. To sit quiet in a school desk is sometimes a challenge for a young child; standing still is the same for a young horse. Discipline is a basic element, but this has to count for everyone. Our way is not by rude manners but by being fair and consistent. This attitude not only helps us while working with the horses, but also in their daily care.

By reading these few lines and looking at the first pictures, it should quickly become clear what this is about. On the one hand, a draft horse, whose work is often portrayed as archaic, and on the other hand, robotic technology, which is supposed to shape modern agriculture. The second choice feels futuristic, more like part of science-fiction. However, a field demonstration on a vegetable and fruit growing farm in Luxembourg at the end of June 2025 provided not only proof that this technology already exists but also an insight into how agricultural technology manufacturers and politicians envision the future of agriculture.

Humankind is only a link in a fragile chain. Maintaining biodiversity is for me definitely a question of survival on this planet. Our future life depends on maintaining biodiversity as not only the susceptibility for natural disasters is reduced by an intact nature, but also the access to clean water, all kinds of food or raw materials is assured. The nitrate and pesticide pollution of the drinking water resources around our village is only one of the problems I can mention here within context.

Sickle bar mowers are no high performance machinery and need a lot of maintenance, compared to disc and drum mowers, but are definitely the better mowers in my opinion. This is not only due to their low impact to the nature, but also due to the quality of their work. The knives cut the grass instead of knocking it off like fast rotating drum and disc mowers. A sharp cut lets the grass grow better again, thus optimizing the next harvest. In Luxembourg you can even get financial support by the Ministry of Environment when participating in a wide-ranging program called “maintaining the biodiversity,” as this mowing technology is recognized as environmentally friendly.

Even as a low-input and low-impact agriculture, mainly following the farming practices of the bygone time, smallholders relying on animal traction must adapt their farming methods. This article is the first in a series of essays dealing with thoughts and new developments relating to future-oriented agriculture. This requires repeated field testing within a trial-and-error approach over several years, which means that the methods described here below are not the end of the story. At best, they represent the current state of the author’s empirical knowledge. These essays are intended to provide inspirations. Let’s move forward questioningly, together!

One way to deal with these different weather extremes is to spread the risk through diversification. When arable farmers expand their crop rotations, they will always have crops that are better adapted to the extreme situation that arises than others. However, in vegetable growing this is much more difficult to implement. Future food security can only be created through an improved climate resilience of our social-ecological system. This requires developing or rediscovering more stable and resilient systems that do not rely on optimizing a single factor. In recent decades, yields and earnings have counted too much.

Since the beginning, the equipment development process of the European non-profit association Schaff mat Päerd has been based on retro-innovation. This approach consists of reviving and reintroducing old or outdated ideas, technologies, or designs in a modern context. It involves taking inspiration from the past and combining it with current advancements to create something new and innovative. It is a dynamic approach to innovation that celebrates the past while embracing the future.

Discipline was not only the name of the game in the road traffic, but also at our first destination, the “SM Brukshästar,” the Swedish championship for draft horses. The 2008 edition took place near a gymnasium for agricultural educations in Rättvik, located more or less in the centre of Sweden. To come to the point, speaking about the Swedish Champions is simply an understatement. The people we saw at this 2 day event are worth being called the true European Champions. Not only in the horse lodging contest, which took place at the same time as a riding competition on Saturday, but also in a coach driving contest on Sunday. The harmony in the cooperation between men and women and horses was impressive.

Within the EU-funded Leader project “Horsepower – Innovation in small-scale agriculture and gardening” an online symposium took place on November 5 and 6. Hosted by Jeanette Junge, business manager of the Swedish Leader LAG PH, a total of 63 participants from 17 countries followed 14 presentations with current reports from research all-around the world, background knowledge and best-practice examples from European smallholdings.

An example of such a hotly debated item in Central Europe is the so-called “trace harness”, also referred as “long gears”. In the bygone time, this type of harness was not only used for agricultural or forestry work, when extra power was required to pull a heavy load, but also in vineyards and in vegetable production. In the first-mentioned operation, two or more horses were hitched “in-line”, one behind the other, and the fact that there was no singletree dragging on the ground prevented the extra lead horse(s) from stepping over the traces. In row crops, the reasons for use were to avoid damage to the crops, by a low singletree, and to be able to turn more easily and very sharply at the headlands.

Farmers and fisherman in the most remote areas of Northern Bangladesh in South Asia, on the shifting sandbar river island, known as Chars, such of the mighty Brahmaputra River. Chars are midstream islands formed through accretion of sedimentation of huge amounts of sand, silt and clay over time. They are in a constant state of transformation. In Bangladesh, one of the most densely populated countries in the world, land is scarce and the Chars are still used as areas for settlement and cultivation.

Regular readers of this journal will be well familiar with the amazing work of Paul Schmit and Albano Moscardo of Schaff mat Päerd in Europe. Their in-depth articles on new continental innovations in animal-drawn technologies have set a very high bar for future inquiries into the discipline. This handsome and eminently practical addition to their Guidebook series covers hitches and hitching of both European and North American types. In addition to the directly practical nature of the information, there is here a subtle and intelligent comparison of two different cultural approaches to the working of horses.

At the beginning of the 1950s, Luxembourg’s photojournalist and chronicler Pol Aschman captured a very unusual scene for his photo series titled “Streifzug Ösling,” translated in English “Excursion to the Ösling.” This does not refer to the mixed team of draught horse and cattle, where only the horse was driven by the farmer with a single jerk line and the ox just ran along besides, but to the wagon. Such tongue-less three-wheel tipping carts were only common in the European lowlands, such the Northwest of France, the coastal areas of Belgium or the Netherlands, where they were called “driewielskar.”

The fact that electric or hybrid passenger cars, and even electric powered agricultural implements like GPS-guided precision seeders and planters, are promoted by the media and politics now, could tempt us to jump on this bandwagon and further develop other hybrid technologies for animal traction. However, taking into consideration the current discussions about the sustainability of battery production, their life cycle and recycling, as well as the environmental impact of electricity generation in general, we would partly give up some of the main arguments for the use of work horses, which are their 100% renewability on a local level, and their eco-friendliness, compared to any other source of motive power currently available in our high-tech world.