08/27/2025
What is a person’s time worth? Lately I’ve been asking myself this. Summer is winding down, and as I look at how far the horses have come, I think about the hours it took to get them here. Long days spent in the cold, rain, wind, and heat. Hours in the saddle, teaching a 1,000-pound animal to soften, to carry themselves correctly, and to ride around quiet enough to keep their next rider safe. Layer on top of that the time it takes to put them on a barrel pattern, to set them up for the next phase of their life, and I wonder what is that time worth?
Is it worth the years of experience and countless hours I’ve spent in the saddle? Is it worth the education I paid for, the thousands of dollars spent on clinics, lessons, and learning from those ahead of me? Or is it worth what the market says, when c**t starters charge over twelve hundred dollars a month just to lay the foundation?
The truth is, our time has value because of what it creates. When you take the time to make a horse better, that horse carries the value of your effort into every ride they’ll give someone else. That kind of investment doesn’t come free. Nobody else works for free, and neither should horsemen and horsewomen.
So next time you see the price on a horse, understand that it’s not just a number. It represents hours, days, and months of work poured into making that horse safe, useful, and better than when it started. There’s a reason they are priced the way they are, because someone’s time and life went into shaping them.
