THIS COMMENT BLOCK relates to the PICTURE HERE. I do not know enough about horses to explain
why the operator is dismounted from his sulky. He paces behind, maybe to quickly stop and
remove debris from the mowing path (pine cones, seeds, or the like); or maybe the horse was
just a flighty beast, not to be trusted. I donοΏ½t know.
While I'm certainly no expert on horses, it wouldn't be because the horse was flighty.
That horse is quite obviously one of the draught or semi-draught 'heavy horse' breeds.
The large hooves and long hair 'feathering' of the hocks are very distinctive characteristics here.
These breeds are also of very calm, 'plodding' temperament - just what you want in a plough horse, which was what most of them were used for. They also often saw use in powering stationary machinery, either in a treadmill, or via a rotary 'capstan' gear/shaft driven setup, where the horse walked in endless circles.
Horse powered ploughing, using mouldboard type ploughs, was usually carried out with the ploughman walking behind, steering the plough through the dirt. Much as is being done in this picture.
Harrowing [to break up the large clods of dirt formed by the plough] would be even more like this; with the horse controlled by long reins as it pulled the flat harrow assembly [think of a steel grid, with down-pointing vertical ~6" long spikes] along.
