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Irish
moss is a cash crop that grows wild in the waters off Prince Edward
Island, Canada. When storms uproot it and send it washing into the surf,
farmers hook up horses to dredges and scoop it up. Brian Barth
describes the process in
Modern Farmer. He talked to 60-year old Joe Dorgan, a lifelong resident of the island:
I
asked Dorgan what I thought was an obvious question: Why horses? When
the tradition started on PEI in the 1930s, draft horses were still
commonly used in agriculture, so it makes sense that their strength
would be harnessed to pull heavy clumps of seaweed ashore. But surely a
more efficient mechanized approach would have been devised by the time
the industry hit its peak in the ’70ss. Dorgan’s answer wasn’t
particularly scientific: “The horses don’t mind the water, and they’re
good workers, and that’s just been the way it was,” he says. “Our
ancestors done it that way and it’s still done that way today.”
I
suspect that the problems associated with using motorized machinery in
saltwater, like accelerated rust and corrosion, may have been a
practical obstacle. But perhaps the industry was never big enough to
warrant R&D investment anyways—a $6 million industry can hardly be
called an industry.
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