Forward Farm

05/08/2025

UK Entomologists have received some reports of greater than average counts of eastern tent caterpillars in the bluegrass area. Horse breeders are encouraged to be vigilant over the next month as caterpillars are likely to be moving across pastures from mid-May to early June. Pregnant mares should be moved away from caterpillars during this migration.

The migration is the normal process as they move from feeding areas to pupate before turning into moths. Caterpillars feed primarily on cherry, crabapple and apple trees and can move 40-100 yards from the tree to pupate. During this movement, pregnant mares may encounter and ingest caterpillars on pasture. Extreme populations of eastern tent caterpillars have been linked to the 2001/2002 outbreak of Mare Reproductive Loss Syndrome (MRLS) in central Kentucky.

More information about the Eastern Tent Caterpillars including control methods were released in April and can be found here: https://news.ca.uky.edu/article/eastern-tent-caterpillar-update-protecting-horses-and-trees-amid-late-winter-conditions

04/13/2025

The possibility of a recession from a very micro-viewpoint……….

If we go into a recession, horses will die.

Some people will not be able to afford the monthly costs of keeping their one, two or three horses. Normal, regular people who have their horses for pleasure, be it regular riding, some small shows & events or simply because they love them. People who sacrifice creature comforts, now, so their charges are well cared for.

I know this from experience.

During the Great Recession, from 2007-09, we (Tierra Madre Horse Sanctuary) took in a number of those very horses. And each & every one of them came in with a sad story – a story of financial distress, a foreclosure on their home, their people having to move to other places to take whatever job came their way.

I was fielding numerous calls every week, sometimes two or three a day. For months & months & months.

And, because my heart is probably larger than my brain, we maxed out at 33 horses on the ranch. Too many, really.

Because each & every one of those horses came with a price tag: feed, supplements, medical supplies, farrier work, more manure that had to be paid for to be hauled away & more. It got to the point where I lay awake at night, staring at the ceiling, wondering whether we’d survive or not. I was buying two days’ worth of hay at a time because that’s all the money I had. Naturally, donations had dwindled & we didn’t have the number of donators that we do today.

To stay comfortably afloat & to give our existing herd the best we possibly can, we are – for all intents & purposes – full. We can take in no more.

And I know that I’m not alone in feeling this way. I know that there are hundreds of rescues & sanctuaries all across this land that are feeling the same way I am: that our phones will be ringing off the hook & that we’ll have to deliver bad news. And, just like with us, every dollar taken in is precious & none of us have vast stores of money to pay for all of the added expenses that would surely come our way when horses find themselves without homes because desperate people will no longer be able to keep their loved ones.

Yes, I realize that our very, very little tiny part of the world that is the rescuing of & caring for horses is but a small pittance compared to the overall damage that a recession would bring but it’s our world. The world we live in.

And my heart breaks for all of the horses that may find themselves in the most challenging times of their precious lives. And for those who won’t be able to find shelter & solace.

And for those who didn’t need to die.

03/18/2025

There was a time when downtown Lexington didn’t feel like it was at any profound risk for obliteration by tornado. 🌪️ However, weather patterns are beginning to shift the majority of domestic tornados outside of the nearly century-old definition of ‘Tornado Alley’, including ripping up non-negligible portions of the Kentucky equestrian landscape. The way that we think about this type of weather emergency happening here no longer feels theoretical.

Common industry pulpit-bellowing will tell you that in the event of an imminent tornado warning, horses belong outside—that a barn collapse will kilł them all or a flying stock trailer, suddenly unmoored and apparently divorced from gravity, will collapse any structure that the animals are contained within. Keeping them stalled is, allegedly, irresponsible or inhumane or even abusė (this just in: apparently something that anyone has ever disagreed with is a form of abusė these days).

We pull every horse on the farm, regardless of demographic, inside for tornado conditions. We are emerging from a holiday weekend full of various weather threats right now and we are actually doing it with everything on the farm still alive, too, so I want to talk about why we do this…and maybe get people reconsidering the idea of letting horses run free in violent atmospheric conditions.

So, I mentioned downtown Lexington at the beginning of this post. When I say ‘downtown’, I do mean it—we are the closest equine boarding facility to downtown Lexington with the possible exception of the historic Patchen Wilkes property. Tornado horse management theory has been predominately colored by the area in which tornadoes have historically happened—locations like Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Missouri. Tornado horse management theory is also relatively old—before horses were kept in seven-dollar custom barns, they were turned out on pastureland or prairie land. The combination of these two things had led to this type of management to be dated and irrelevant in the climate that my personal barn—& many other barns in 2025–now exist in.

If I lived in Oklahoma in 1952–the year that Tornado Alley was identified and christened—I would be living in a flat, dry area that was most likely populated by other ranchers. The landscape would be devoid of gated neighborhoods and hundreds of miles from I-75, one of the most heavy-traveled roadways in the world. In fact, highways as an entity were still in their most infant stages. Most importantly, the neighbors would be people who also managed free-range horses—people who know what to do if an injured horse ended up in their yard…people who could read a brand…people who could render first aid…people who could feed the horse knowledgeably before its eventually recovery by me.

I don’t live in Oklahoma in 1952. I live in downtown Lexington in 2025 and while I’m extremely privileged to do so in a political environment that seems Hełl-bent on destroying all remaining pastureland, that means that I have to accept that I live in an ever-expanding large city. My neighbors are not ranchers; my neighbors are actually the gated Brookmonte subdivision, where houses with six bedrooms and yards roughly the size of a postage stamp somehow sell for multiple millions of dollars. I’m based on Delong Road, a heavily traveled & winding lane that connects Richmond Road to Tates Creek Road. Three miles away is the on-ramp to the interstate. Being situated on about seventy acres, my farm also hosts many miles of fences. Those miles of fences are a much bigger target for a tornado than a single building at the back of the property.

Pictured here are two mares resting inside during this past weekend’s high winds; the one on the right is retired Thoroughbred racehorse Electric Boat. With Thoroughbreds cruising at over 30MPH, that would give me less than ten minutes of her bolting eastward before she would be standing in the middle of I-75S if her pasture fence was, at any section, obliterated. On the way, she would encounter downed power lines and Delong Road traffic and thousands of local people who unfortunately are so removed from livestock that they can’t tell a fetlock from a forelock.

The world isn’t changing—it already changed while we were not paying attention. How many of our management principles should we also finally change to accommodate where we’ve landed?

01/14/2025

unnamed
2023 / 14.3hh+ / filly
💲5️⃣0️⃣0️⃣0️⃣

01/14/2025

unnamed
2023 / 15.0hh+ / filly
💲1️⃣0️⃣0️⃣0️⃣0️⃣

01/14/2025

Kiss My Sass (Mercedes)
2007 / 14.3hh / mare
lease options -
💲9️⃣0️⃣0️⃣ quarterly off-farm
💲1️⃣8️⃣0️⃣0️⃣ quarterly on-site

01/10/2025

I’m too unfit to ride anything seriously right now and, largely due to resembling a ball of pizza dough, I likely will not do so again…but I’m also nosy so I was looking for the US Equestrian team selection criteria for the 2026 FEI Endurance World Championship. As some of you know, endurance is fairly unique in terms of selections because you cannot compete your horse almost every single weekend like you can in other equestrian disciplines—it takes about four weeks for a horse to fully recover from a full 160km race. This means that top horses often have less than twelve outings annually and horses competing at the lower levels will actually rack up a larger number of competitions, albeit shorter ones. Because of this, selection criteria for the national team typically encompasses a few specific Selection Events over the course of not one season, but two.

It’s currently January of 2025. Worlds 2026 is in October of that year. We are technically over a month into the 2025 season because the equestrian sport calendar rolls over in early December. Despite this, there is zero~ information posted about Worlds selection criteria for US Equestrian. Nothing regarding this has been uploaded to the athlete information page. This means that there are endurance riders—including our top riders—making their travel schedule and starting to pay their 2025 bills just hoping that they’re making the same decisions that the brass does whenever someone with decision-making power gets around to it. They don’t know where they should be allocating funds or booking accommodation because the season is here, but the blueprint for how to have a successful one is not.

Flashback to 2024: this past summer, I had to update some information with US Equestrian. While I was on the telephone with the organization, I checked my Zone status online just to see two different Zone maps with two different Zones indicated for my address (plus a table of data which, incidentally, agreed with neither map). When I asked the endurance office which Zone I should mark on my account, referring to the two contradictory maps, they advised me that they actually did not know and they were going to need some time to inform me.

My address is about a mile from the US Equestrian headquarters. That means, for at least a brief period of time in 2024, the administration that executes the districting plan for entirety of the internationally-affiliated endurance riders in this country did not know which Zone they had allocated their own physical location (and the site of the 2010 WEG championship) to.

This irregularity has since been corrected on the US Equestrian website.

I’m away from endurance, possibly permanently. I still love this sport because I think that it’s a great, pre-written response to a lot of the critiques of international equestrian activity. You can make teams on very cheap and home-broke horses. You don’t need a coach. You can literally fall off multiple times and still win an event as long as you have excellent horsemanship and first aid skills. Horses are actually passed on to the next loop based on whether their bodies are stressed: veterinarians exam pulse, respiration, gut motility, capillary refill, and other vitals to determine how comfortable the horse is while performing. You don’t need to travel or compete too extensively due to the long rest periods between upper level competitions. Whips and crops and spurs are actually banned, for everyone who is super worried about the court of public opinion (I think that this is now called ‘social license to operate’, which sounds less snarky). The person who cries the least typically wins. It’s a sport for people who just really like sport, which I appreciate and I think that a lot of you guys can as well.

However—

Endurance is in legitimate danger of dying out domestically due to a large number of factors—and I’m really concerned that one of them is way less complicated than The Economy™️ or land use law. I really think that a key failure is that endurance is not valued by our national governing body, despite the fact that it’s one of the core pillars of the FEI. I like my conversations with the people in the endurance area of US Equestrian’s offices. They seem like good people who are excited to be doing the work that they do. However, they also seem chronically unsupported, often making last-minute announcements regarding the even the highest levels of competition, and endurance remains this country’s redheaded stepchild in terms of engagement. It’s rarely featured on social media or streaming services; selection processes are not even publicized in a timely manner, never mind well-known enough to be debated and anticipated by the public. Showjumping, eventing, dressage—you can name your country’s leading riders or horses in these disciplines. You can probably even name several top hunters, despite not even being a sport supported at the FEI or Olympic level. Who are the current leading endurance athletes, though?

Endurance needs promotion, investment, the same marketing artistry afforded to other sports under the purview of US Equestrian, a robust office staff that is well-equipped to administrate its public image as well as they obviously want to, and possibly incentives as we deal with a population of aging athletes, a serious reduction of domestic hotblood lines, staggering logistical issues with land use, a turbulent situation regarding disposable income for many households, and a lot of gravitation towards the ‘do it for the aesthetic’ energy that currently powers glitzy events like the World Cup showjumping series. Endurance is a sport that is what all of you say that you want equestrian sport to be. It’s also neglected and underfunded at the national and international level, possibly terminally so. I love it but as far as I know, love has never stopped any other long and slow death.

11/13/2024

10/19/2024

Yo, I’ve got a question for the farm managers.

What the fūċķ~ are you doing to these kids?

I’ve been doing paid, working interviews at the farm for the last week trying to get some more people with a pulse in here before the clocks change and we are fighting for daylight. These girls are all at least marginally competent to get past my screening process—I only take people with certain experience profiles and that’s typically going to include track Thoroughbreds, stallions, and the actual enjoyment of physical exertion (because the amount of walking necessary on this property is admittedly outrageous).

Now, I’m not the nicest person. I am wholly aware of and comfortable with that. Being nice isn’t worth it; being good is more interesting and also more important. Having said that, you would have thought that me dragging my arthritic back and facial scar out of barn was the reanimation of Mother Theresa or something with how these kids are receiving me. They are so anxious that the first words out of their mouth is always an apology—they’re sorry for being early, how they parked, what clothes they’re wearing, how their hair looks—& immediately get nervous enough to get even the older horses get to jigging sideways. They’re scandalized when I say ‘go get the two bay geldings out of the field’ and throw them a pair of shanks—because they’re expecting micromanagement or a scrutinized practical exam instead of just…being trusted to do the job that they’re there to do. They panic when they don’t know how to do a lip chain even though it takes less than thirty seconds for me to show them and not a single one has screwed it up after having it demonstrated. They cringe at literally any misstep or slightly halting movement and are visibly baffled when it isn’t called out loudly and publicly. Overall, these kids are so fear-driven, reactive, and hyper-aware that they give five-year-old, gate-flipping, stall-walking Bird a run for her money. They think that I’m outrageously laissez faire and aloof…and the only conclusion that I can draw is that this is not what they have experienced in their previous positions…which is ridiculous because again, I am not a pleasant person. I should not be a breath of fresh air or even particularly remarkable. When I find out whatever their previous bosses have done to get nearly an entire generation of staff this damn fretful, I feel like I’m going to suffer quite a bit of disappointment. I’ll ask whoever I end up hiring to name names. Y’all had really better hope that none of them name you. 😪