Maintaining Great Pasture

Finally it's the grass growing season again (fall) and chances are your horses are rolling around in the dust . Having super dry pastures in late summer are an inevitable part of late summer. If you want to maintain great looking pastures as well as good forage for your horses you'll need to institute a pasture resting program. Proper care -- resting and rotating -- of your pastures should be a maintenance priority for your farm.

Creating a Sacrifice Area

This is probably the single most important thing you can do to help maintain your pastures. When your pastures are dry and the grass is brown and crispy - you may be well on your way to dust which eventually turns to mud when the rains come. Turning your horses out on these fields will be detrimental to recovery. Once you have created mud or dust and torn up the turf, you have very little chance in getting grass to grow back and you may have invited some serious erosion problems.

A sacrifice area is an area of pasture that is designated for turn out when the ground is wet or the ground is super dry. This paddock area (if it has grass now will not have grass for very long) by design will have a dirt surface or an engineered surface created out of blue stone. Horses are turned out in the sacrifice area until the ground in the other pastures has stablized enough to sustain horse traffic.

The location of your sacrifice area should be convenient to the barn and hidden from view as much as possible or screened with landscaping because it will not be very attractive.

Dividing Pasture

The second most important factor to maintaining great looking pastures is to split your pastures from one large one into three to four smaller ones. Rotating and resting your fields will go a long way to helping the grass to regenerate. In good growing conditions, fields can regenerate in two to three weeks time.

Mowing

Most people think there is no need to mow fields because the horses do the mowing. This is an often misunderstood concept. Your best defense against weeds is consistent mowing. Your pastures should be mowed several times throughout the growing season to a height of six to eight inches (six inches being better). Mowing will reduce the weeds and improve the grass stand.

Herbicides, Seeding & Fertilizing, Liming

Often it will take an aggressive act to eradicate the weeds and spraying a broad leaf herbicide may be your best bet. Talk with your local farm extension or state university, sometimes they will offer guidance and assistance free of charge. Soil samples should be taken and analyzed before applying fertilizer, and/or lime. You will want to get your soils in balance before you do any seeding.

- The Equestrian Services Team

Have you ever wondered why large, successful businesses that own horses aren't in the business of serving equestrians? Companies like Budweiser, Mars Candy and Campbell Soup - all of these companies own large horse farms and have a history of horse ownership. Why aren't they owning and running equestrian centers as a business? Why?

Because there is no money in the equestrian facility business model.

There's an old joke in the equine industry that says "What's the best way to make a small fortune in horses?" The answer? - "Start out with a large fortune." It's long been an accepted idea that businesses in the horse industry are not run like other businesses - they are emotionally driven instead of economically driven. Many of the people running these enterprises have shunned the business world. They have, in fact, avoided dealing with people by working with animals instead. These factors have lead to a variety of problems in the industry. Many of these businesses are not financially sound, and the "isolation" of barn operators fosters an "old school" mentality which resists change.

The "old school" mentality of barn operation consistently overlooks or under appreciates four main components of running a successful equestrian business: (1) you must fully embrace the idea that this really is a business you are running and you must be realistic in your economic expectations (2) your success is integrally linked to customer service - this is a service based industry so you will have to learn how to serve clients (3) you must have a business plan - this will help you have a clearly defined vision of what your services are as well as a detailed look at your competition and (4) you will need a solid operational budget detailing your revenue projections as well as your overhead costs.

If you have accurate data, realistic economic expectations and plan properly, you won't end up with a mortgage or expenses you can't cover each month. Just because you could run a robust lesson program at 100% capacity doesn't mean that it will ever happen - especially during holidays and during cold winter months. Be conservative with your revenues, plan your budget based on 70% capacity during warmer seasons and as little as 40% capacity during the cold winter months. Also be liberal with your capital expenditure numbers. Often if you call a supplier and get a quote on an indoor arena, the price you are quoted may seem reasonable. However, you haven't budgeted for site work, pad preparation and the number that was given to you doesn't include anything - no kick wall, lights, garage-style doors, man doors, irrigation, base preparation, seating or footing costs. Once you really add up all the numbers, you may be shocked that the true costs is twice what you expected and budgeted for.

The devil is in the details......so make sure you really do your homework. Call other local facilities and ask if they can tell you what they are paying for water or electricity, or insurance - they may have data that can paint a realistic picture.

Success can be found in managing expectations... yours, your clients' and your bankers'.

Illness is a fact of life for all living beings and, to horse-owners, an illness that attacks our herd might as well be attacking our family. We dread it and fret over it, and yet few of us prepare for its eventuality as properly as we should. It may be because of the “it won’t happen to me” syndrome, or perhaps it is the added expense and land allocation that stop us, but the truth is this should be our slogan: Have Horses, Must Quarantine.

With the Equine Herpes Virus attacks that afflicted several riding and track operations in the U.S. last year and in the beginning of 2006, and the worries about new viruses threatening both animal and human populations --such as the infamous Bird Flu-- this is a timely issue to tackle. Biosecurity requires a three-pronged approach:

1. Vaccinate regularly
2. Do not introduce new diseases
3. Do not allow transmission of existing disease

All three are important management strategies, and a quarantine area can help you with at least two of them.

Proactive Quarantine Areas

We all know quarantine areas as the place where sick horses are segregated, hence preventing the spread of disease. However, they are not only for horses that are ill. In fact, their most important role is that of protector from illness, separating newly arrived horses from the regular equine residents and preventing the introduction of new diseases. The quarantine area can be your knight in shining armor, riding in just in time to save your horses. But in order for it to be effective, it must be prepared for battle before illness strikes.

A quarantine area need not be an ugly, unsightly component of your farm. It can be a cute little stall or run-in shed with a sweet little paddock or turn-out area of its own, but it does need to be at least 300 yards from your central facility and from contact with your main herd. This is because air-borne illnesses and infected insects tend not to travel beyond the 300 yard boundary. If you have ample availability of land you may even want to go beyond that distance (up to 2 miles is best!), but make sure that the distance involved in feeding and caring for a quarantined horse doesn’t also cause a management nightmare. Having to feed and clean two separate locations can affect your bottom line in terms of labor hours, or if you are the main caretaker for you horses, it can become an additional burden, so location planning is key. And this brings us to the next point: efficiency.

Efficient Quarantine Areas

Like with all other elements of your equestrian facility, planning is possibly the most important aspect of your quarantine area. Planning will help you correctly locate the quarantine area within your property so that it is not only effective, but also efficient.

So let’s look to the purpose of a quarantine area for answers on planning for it. What does the quarantine area do? First, it segregates sick horses from the rest of the herd so that, at the very first sign of illness, the disease can be contained as much as possible. Second, it separates newly arrived horses from the herd so that, should there be latent disease in the newly arrived horse, the regular residents are not infected.

Now, how does the quarantine area do what it does? It segregates through distance, but it also needs time to be effective: 14 to 21 days of quarantine are usually sufficient for a concealed disease to emerge as symptoms in a new equine resident. Then, once a disease has manifested itself, your vet (and sometimes the State vet, if the condition is highly contagious) will tell you for how long the horse or horses must be quarantined. In addition, you may be instructed to handle sick horses with rubber or disposable gloves and/or change clothes and shoes between handling of sick and healthy horses, so that you don’t transport contagion on your person. Needless to say, the sick horse’s buckets, grooming tools, blankets…they all must be segregated from your healthy horses.

Therein is the importance of planning: time and distance will determine the success of your quarantine area and, by extension, of your operation during a crisis. You will want your quarantine area to be at a certain distance, and yet easily accessible and manageable. If you must change clothes between the quarantine area and your main barn, you may want the quarantine area to be on your way out, so that you only have to change once and so that the last contact you have before going home to shower was contact with the quarantined horse/s. Quarantine clothes and shoes may even need to “live” at the quarantined area, so plan for even a small storage space. You will also want to have access to water, electricity and all the comforts of an equine home, so planning for your quarantine area must be done in unison with planning for your water access routes and electrical work. Think of direct outlets, because x-ray machines sometimes require direct contact to an electrical source, rather than through an extension cord, and you may have to clip areas of your horse’s coat for veterinary interventions. A quarantined horse may have to be off pasture, so planning for a dry turn-out area is essential.

The health of your horses may well depend on having an assigned quarantine area and facility, and it may save the health of your operation as well. The cost of having to plan, design and build one may seem unnecessary to you at first but, believe me, disease can happen to any of us and it is better to be safe than sorry. And the first time you lose an irreplaceable horse (and aren’t they all?) the cost of that quarantine area will seem insignificant in comparison. Better to be safe; don’t be caught thinking “what if….”

Alex Abella, Director Equestrian Management, LLC

Designing and constructing any amenity is costly. Unfortunately, with most amenities, developers do not have the luxury of building the amenity in stages over time to stagger up-front expenses. You can’t build only three holes of a golf course at one time, or build half of a swimming pool – it’s all or nothing.

But for developers tapping into an exploding market such as horseback riding, where demand is continually increasing and sometimes hard to gauge, staging construction of the amenity is usually a viable and wise option. Staging an equestrian amenity allows the developer not only to spread the construction costs over time, but it also ensures that the amenity is not overbuilt (a waste of money) or underbuilt (a sales buster).

Although trails need to be built early in the development process due to their impact on the site design, equestrian recreation areas such as arenas, cross county courses, round pens and rings can easily be staged throughout the development process as sales occur and income is generated. Likewise, an experienced equestrian planner and designer can design the barn or barns in such a way that the construction of stalls is staged to meet demand. This ensures that a developer is not stuck with expensive stalls which sit empty, but more importantly, it enables the developer to remain agile in the sales process by continually meeting the demand of equestrian buyers. We have seen seasoned developers have to turn away qualified equestrian buyers because the developer did not plan for enough stalls to satisfy market demand.

This is just one of the many advantages of an equestrian amenity, but it is a benefit that must be carefully planned for and executed. When done right, a staged equestrian amenity has a very positive impact on a project’s return on investment.

 Horses appeal to many people for many different reasons. For some, it is their sheer magnitude, presence and beauty. For others, it is the pursuit of the interconnectedness (becoming one with the horse) that is possible through riding. For still others, horses represent natural open space with minimal human manipulation. Horses, open meadows, woodsy bridle paths-all these images remind us of our connection to the earth and to the web of life.

Whether the private individual desiring to bring their horses home or a resort or community looking to create an equestrian amenity, the programming phase is an essential first step to designing and operating a successful equestrian facility. Many can design a barn (this is actually the easy part), the complex and key component to success is understanding precisely what the barn and any associated facilities are to achieve. This is programming. Effectively and accurately developing a program that meets a client's individual goals, produces valuable results including i) the remainder of the design process to proceed more directly and with fewer iterations ii) construction to proceed with fewer changes and iii) the establishment of a well-defined framework for operations from the design phase. This adds value by reducing both the time and cost of the overall project.