Why does farming equipment require such low horsepower compared to your average car?
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They go at pretty slow speeds so the engines are built around high torque and long term reliability
At low speeds, power scales linearly with speed so pulling a plow that takes 1 ton of force at 10 mph requires half as much power as pulling the same plow at 20 mph. If you’re only ever going to pull that plow at 10 mph you don’t need a huge amount of power, lots of farming equipment doesn’t work if you pull it too fast.
Cars and trucks need to get up to highway speeds over a relatively short distance, this is really why we put 100+ horse power in everything these days. You only need about 30 hp to cruise on the highway but doing 30-70 on a short onramp to get up to a safe speed requires quite a lot more power.
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