Natural Hoof Care Inc

06/05/2026

The horse pictured here is genetically predisposed to equine metabolic syndrome (EMS) and was given free choice, unlimited access to hay. He developed obesity, hyperinsulinemia, and ultimately insulin-induced laminitis. When he could no longer stand, hay was kept in front of him 24/7.

After getting a hay analysis, the owner was advised how much to feed based on actual energy requirements (calories consumed vs. calories expended), to weigh the hay, and to use slow feeders. When the horse was sound, the owner scattered the hay over several acres. The horse made a full recovery and achieved his ideal weight in 9 months.

For weight loss, a good rule of thumb is to feed 1.5% of current weight, or 2.0% of ideal body weight in hay (lbs/day), whichever is more. Example: Overweight horse of 1200 lbs, ideal weight is 1000 lbs. [1200 lbs x 0.015 = 18 lbs/day; 1000 lbs x 0.02 = 20 lbs/day]. Use of slow feeders or small hole hay nets will slow consumption. More information here: https://bit.ly/3Cmh50L

05/26/2026

UPDATE on the early career farrier/trimmer workshop series hosted by Liselle Batt
tentative dates and topics are posted below

these workshops are intended for anyone who has completed farrier/trimmer school or apprenticeships and are looking at becoming professionals.

if interested, contact Liselle to get registered to get current up to date information on each workshop as the dates get near

05/05/2026

This.

"ISO farrier who doesn't charge an arm and a leg"

This essay will be a compilation of thoughts that have been swirling around for awhile..... in which I'll attempt basic math with loose interpretation of some numbers. If you're going to be a nerd about my numbers, you're missing the point.

First, being a farrier is a niche skill in high demand. The United States has the largest horse population in the world with 6-10 million horses. With only 28,000 farriers estimated by the American Farriers Journal, every farrier should have 285 or more horses on their schedule to ensure all horses have hoof care (assuming an average of 8 million horses).

285 horses = 71 horses/week, 10 horses a day, 7 days a week.
Don't want to work every day with no break, forever and ever?
Then it's 15 horses a day, 5 days a week.

Some farriers can handle that workload. I personally cannot.
Assuming all your clients live 0 minutes away from you, everyone stands well, horses are ready for you, and you have no shenanigans, you're looking at 5 - 7 hours/day for barefoot trims on 15 horses. That's the most unrealistic math I've ever done 😂.

If you're doing half sets, full sets, or glue ons, I'm not sure many farriers could/should do 15 of those a day. And you're looking at a 15 hour day minimum without any travel time or interruptions.

Farriers come to you, so add in realistic travel time and their hours spent working get longer, with less horses they can get to in daylight.

Second, you want a GOOD farrier. General standards would be: shows up, communicates, is reasonably skilled and knowledgeable at the craft, is friendly to you and your horse. Rates will vary. You can have fast, good, and cheap but never all three at the same time.

Out of those 28,000 farriers, not all of them are good.

Third, some of you have never run your own business so you don't understand what happens behind the scenes.

When you go buy a new car and you don't like the price, you shop around or negotiate with the sales person. But you know the salesperson ultimately isn't in charge or control of the market rate. When you go grocery shopping and prices have gone up, you may put something back on the shelf, but you don't yell at the cashier on your way out. They have nothing to do with rising costs.

But those are big corporations. Your farrier is a small business. You're looking at the person who sets their rates. When you say things like "I can't believe what I'm being charged for shoes these days...." you're saying you don't think your farrier should be able to pay their bills and run a successful business. You won't find the email address of the Toyota CFO and write them a strongly worded letter about the price of your new car. But you will fuss and complain about your farrier bill to their face or behind their back.

Make that make sense....

There is a difference between saying "that's not in my budget right now" and "I can't believe you charge an arm and a leg for nailing on some shoes."

I don't personally know a single farrier who is overcharging for their business model. Whether they are talented at their craft is up to you to decide. But farriery is a career. Our business must be profitable for it to be sustainable.

Fourth, hoof care is essential and every horse needs it on a regular basis. So we're back to the original dilemma - millions of horses and not enough (good) farriers.

Solutions?
Farriers: insist on safe working conditions, charge whatever you need to, and take care of yourself so you can go the distance.
Owners: get your horses trained to stand better, don't have more horses than you can afford, and consider yourself lucky (considering the aforementioned math) if you have a good farrier.

If you made it this far - the image I chose is of my new composite toe boots to protect my injured foot. Fitting, I think.

PS - if this comes across as unsympathetic to owners....I can see why. Owning horses is becoming more and more expensive, prohibitively so for many people. But that isn't due to farrier prices.

PPS - if you think my little Grinch heart has shrunk too small, don't worry. I'm still kissing pony noses and loving our equine friends. Perhaps this is just the beginning of my seasonal depression 🙃 summer is almost here.......🐎

04/26/2026

04/25/2026

You should always trim the hoof flat. Right?

There has been interesting debate on farrier discussion pages about trimming methods that create a non-level or non-flat solar surface. Many of the comments mocking the method do so from a lack of understanding of what is actually being proposed, and from a lack of understanding of its genuine peer-reviewed validation through the work of Dr Hagen and colleagues on F-Balance, centre of pressure migration, and hoof loading patterns .

The mistake is thinking the method is simply “trimming the foot wonky.”

It is not.

The hoof is not a flat block of horn. It is a three-dimensional deformable capsule. It loads in the sagittal plane, the medio-lateral plane, and the transverse plane. That transverse plane matters because it is where torsion occurs. When the limb loads off-axis, the hoof capsule does not simply become higher on one side and lower on the other. The dorsal capsule, heels, quarters, bars, sole, and bulbs can rotate in relation to each other. In other words, the hoof can twist.

That twist is not random. It is the result of repeated loading over time.

This is why a hoof can appear distorted in ways that do not make sense if you only look from the bottom and ask, “Is it level?” A sheared heel, displaced bulb, flared wall, upright quarter, migrated heel, or distorted bar is often not an isolated feature. It is part of a three-dimensional deformation pattern.

This is also why simply trimming the solar surface flat can be misleading. If the capsule is torsioned, then making the bottom look flat may actually preserve the twist. You may have made the foot visually neater, but you may not have addressed the mechanical distortion that created the morphology in the first place.

Three-dimensional trimming methods such as F-Balance are trying to read that deformation pattern. They are not saying, “make the foot uneven.” They are saying, “stop assuming the distorted foot should be trimmed to an artificial flat plane.”

The functional sole becomes important because it gives information about how the foot has adapted around load. The sole, bars, frog, wall, and heel structures are not decorative landmarks. They are the visible expression of a capsule that has been loaded, deformed, reinforced, and grown under mechanical demand. When a practitioner follows the functional sole correctly, they are attempting to respect the internal organisation of the foot rather than imposing a cosmetic level surface over the top of it.

The aim is not to create imbalance. The aim is to remove the distortion that is preventing the capsule from untwisting.

That is the bit many people miss.

If a hoof has torsioned under repeated off-axis loading, then the trim has to allow the foot to load in a way that encourages counter-rotation back toward a more neutral state. This does not mean forcing the foot into a shape. It means removing the parts of the trim plane that are maintaining the rotational distortion, while preserving the structures that tell you where the functional foot actually is.

This is why the method can look strange to someone expecting a flat solar surface.

But strange does not mean wrong.

A twisted structure may need a non-flat intervention to return toward a less twisted state. That is basic mechanics. If you only assess the finished trim by whether it looks flat on the bottom, you have already reduced a three-dimensional problem into a two-dimensional one.

Dr Hagen’s work is important here because it showed that trimming strategy influences hoof loading patterns and centre of pressure migration. That matters because it validates the central principle that farriery changes are not merely cosmetic. They alter how force travels through the foot. F-Balance is not just an internet trimming fad. It has been investigated in peer-reviewed work looking at the relationship between trimming, loading symmetry, and pressure distribution.

That does not mean every person claiming to use a three-dimensional method is doing it correctly. It does not mean every non-level trim is justified. It does not mean the foot should be randomly sculpted because someone has learned a few new terms.

But it does mean the mockery is often misplaced.

The real question is not, “Is the sole perfectly flat?”

The real question is, “Does this trim reduce pathological torsion, improve the spatial relationship of the capsule to the limb, and allow the hoof to load more centrally over time?”

That is a much harder question.

And that is exactly why these methods require understanding, not ridicule.

Webinars for further education

The physics and biomechanics of medio-lateral balance…

https://equineeducationhub.thinkific.com/courses/landing

F-Balance

https://equineeducationhub.thinkific.com/courses/f-balance-webinar

Understanding hoof morphology and introduction to 3D trimming methods, webinar with the Hoof Architect

https://equineeducationhub.thinkific.com/courses/understanding-hoof-morphology-1

04/20/2026

Send a message to learn more

04/13/2026

You cannot force posture onto a horse when the hoof is telling the body to stand differently!?

One of the biggest misunderstandings in modern equine therapy is the belief that posture can simply be “corrected” by manually placing the horse into a new shape. I see it all the time, body work and veterinary treatment being done to a horse while I look at its feet and just sigh.

Stretch it.
Massage it.
Mobilise it.
Strengthen it.
Train it into position.
Jab it with steroids.

And whilst all of those things may have value, there is a fundamental truth people keep missing.

You cannot sustainably change posture if the horse’s proprioceptive system is still demanding the original compensation.

Why?

Because posture is not something the horse consciously chooses.

Posture is the visible output of the nervous system’s constant attempt to organise the body in response to incoming information.

That information comes from everywhere, but one of the richest and most mechanically important sensory inputs in the entire horse is the hoof.

The hoof is not just a block of horn at the bottom of the limb. It is packed with mechanoreceptors, proprioceptive structures, vascular structures, and deformable tissues that continuously feed information into the nervous system regarding load, pressure, deformation, balance, and orientation. 

Every time the hoof meets the floor, it tells the horse’s nervous system something about where the body is in space.

It tells the horse whether the limb feels stable.
It tells the horse whether the load is symmetrical.
It tells the horse whether one side feels overloaded.
It tells the horse whether the system feels comfortable under compression. And this information can be distorted by imbalance.

And the nervous system uses that information to organise posture accordingly.

This means posture is not simply muscular habit. It is an adaptive response to sensory input.

Let me put that another way.

If the hoof is repeatedly telling the nervous system that a certain position reduces discomfort, improves balance, or better distributes force, the body will organise around that signal. In a webinar with Dr Gellman we discussed the horses understanding of upright..

https://equineeducationhub.thinkific.com/courses/proandpos

The horse will stand in the way the nervous system believes is safest.

So if you manually straighten the horse, stretch the horse, or try to train the horse into a new posture without changing the proprioceptive and mechanical signals that caused the compensation in the first place, what happens?

The horse simply returns to the original posture.

Because from the nervous system’s perspective, nothing meaningful changed.

You altered the output temporarily.
You did not alter the input.

This is precisely why so many practitioners see temporary changes after treatment, only for the horse to revert days later.

Because unless the underlying sensory and mechanical drivers are addressed, the nervous system will keep returning to the same solution.

My upcoming book discusses this as a closed loop.

Hoof mechanics alter proprioceptive input.
That proprioceptive input alters muscle tone and fascial loading.
That altered tone changes posture.
That posture changes limb orientation and movement.
That movement then changes loading back into the hoof. 

It is a self-reinforcing system.

Once established, it will continue feeding itself until the dominant driver is changed.

This is why I have repeatedly said hoof balance and posture cannot be viewed in isolation.

If the hoof is imbalanced enough to create altered loading, altered proprioceptive feedback, or altered comfort under load, then the body will compensate around that.

And until that signal is reduced, you are asking the horse to ignore its own nervous system.

That is not rehabilitation.
That is fighting biology.

Imagine trying to stand perfectly upright whilst one foot is on a slope and one foot is on flat ground.

Could you force yourself straight for a moment? Yes.

Would your body naturally stay there? No.

Why?

Because your nervous system would constantly reorganise your body to accommodate the information coming from the feet.

The horse is no different.

This is why I often say, you cannot expect to change the architecture upstairs whilst the foundations downstairs are still crooked.

Now to be clear, this does not mean every postural issue is hoof derived.

Far from it.

The relationship is bi directional.

Higher limb pain, saddle fit, rider asymmetry, visceral tension, autonomic stress, trauma, and pathology can all alter posture first, which then changes loading into the hoof. The hoof may then adapt secondarily. In the same vane, farriers can struggle with the same perpetuations when higher postural drivers are not addressed!

But the principle remains the same.

Once the hoof becomes part of the compensatory loop, it becomes one of the drivers maintaining that loop.

And if you ignore that, you will struggle to create lasting change.

This is why multidisciplinary work matters.

The farrier cannot always fix posture alone. Or hoof balance for that matter!
The physio cannot always fix posture alone.
The vet cannot always fix pain alone.

Because the horse is an integrated system.

But equally, anyone trying to change posture whilst ignoring hoof proprioception is working with one hand tied behind their back.

Because no matter how good your treatment is, the horse will always listen to the signals coming from the ground.

The hoof is the horse’s interface with reality.

And reality always wins.

Something discussed in depth in both my webinars with Celeste-Leilani Lazaris

https://equineeducationhub.thinkific.com/bundles/yogi-sharp-and-celeste-lazaris-webinar-bundle