Kris De Decker of Low-tech Magazine (not affiliated with The Low-Tech Times) brings up some very interesting points in his most recent article Bring back the horses:
Replacing tractors with horses would be a good move since horse manure is a perfect fertilizer for agricultural soil…
Horses have more advantages over tractors. They reproduce themselves, while tractors don’t. That means more oil saved, and other resources like water and metals, because if you switch to horses you don’t have to manufacture tractors. And while tractors need fossil fuels to operate, horses don’t.
Obviously the mechanization of farming made sense due to increased efficiencies in large scale of farming; the article goes on to state that a transition back to horses might only make sense when oil becomes prohibitively expensive. At what price point does oil trigger a return to old-fashioned farming techniques?