A Barter-Based Horse Economy?

I had one of those intuitive flashes the other day that's got me looking around for evidence to back it up. Well, make that FURTHER evidence, because the evidence I do have is what enabled my intuition to connect some dots.

The dots create a picture that looks something like this: As economic and demographic conditions squeeze the horse industry tighter, making horses harder to sell and harder to afford, the degree of BARTERING could be increasing, while the degree of cash exchange could be going down.

I don't know about yours, but in my little corner of the horse world, there's more trade-out stuff going on that I ever remember seeing. Sometimes it's the trading of one horse for another. Sometimes it's a trade of a horse for services, or for goods that don't eat. Sometimes it's a trade of goods for other goods--say, a saddle in exchange for a load of hay.

I've started doing a certain amount of barter-based business myself, and I guess that's what got me tuned into it as a possible arising trend. Most of the time, it's not me who's initiated it. Instead, someone's come to me with an offer to trade X for Y, with no cash involved.

My rule of thumb on trendspotting is to start paying attention whenever something happens in three unrelated instances. I'm way past three personal episodes now on the bartering concept. My antennae, therefore, are up.

Your thoughts?

Breakfast With Tiffany (it's foaling time!)

Photo at right: Here is Tiffany, having her first breakfast. (click to enlarge)

After spending the last week on foal watch, I went to the barn at 3 a.m. today and saw not one, but two sets of ears. Our gray AQHA mare, Gust A Gray (aka Gussie) had delivered her latest, a tall and healthy filly by Polo Ridge Farm's Absolute Option (www.poloridge.com), right after I finally dozed to sleep. (Typical mare, or what). Ed and I made sure she was nursing and otherwise healthy before heading to the house to get ready for work, send out a few e-mails, etc. We brought our own coffee and breakfast back out the barn, just to bask in the afterglow of a problem-free delivery AND a gorgeous result to boot.

"What should we name her?" I asked Ed. "I think 'Tiffany,' he replied, "because we're having breakfast with her, and she's such a gorgeous gem."

"Funny," I mused back, "but that's the name that occurred to me yesterday, and that's before I even knew we'd have a filly."

Can't argue with mutual intuition. Tiffany, it is!

What's In Your Feedroom?

OK, maybe you don't even have a feedroom...for lots of us, a corner of an aisle or stall serves as our feed-storage area. In any case, I'm just curious to learn what you buy and keep on hand as equine feedstuffs. Here's my list:

* Grass and alfalfa hay (two kinds, not a mix), in small square bales. We buy 20 tons each summer.
* Pelleted beet pulp.
* Oats.
* Purina Strategy, for a boarded horse.
* LMF Development, and Showtime, for my yearling filly and 4-year-old gelding, respectively.
* Strongic C pelleted dewormer.
* HorseGuard supplement.
* TDI-10 supplement.
* SmartPak, individual-dose supplements, for a boarded horse.
* Trace-mineralized salt blocks.

I do happen to have a feedroom, with shelves and lidded bins for storing all these goodies. Interestingly, it was originally built for bulk oats storage, with an exterior opening through which oats were augered in, and a small interior chute from which oats were dispersed into individual feed buckets. Fairly easy to tell that the barn was designed by someone with a dairy-cattle background; it has the equivalent of a cream-separating room, too, where I now store all my horse meds.

One Step Closer to My Kinda Horse

When my great gelding Ace finally got old and passed away in September 2004, I was overwhelmed. Not just by grief, but also by loss of the seemingy irreplaceable. Ace was my Everything Horse--show horse, trail pal, magazine model, idea inspiration, barn entertainer, best friend of another species, sometimes almost a second spouse. "No way," I remember thinking, "will I ever have another horse like him again."

I'm starting to soften a bit on that position. This past Saturday, I took Riley--still just a yearling when Ace died--on a five-hour mountain ride, with over 100 other horses out on the trail. And except for a bit of silliness at the start, Riley provided me with a lovely ride, negotiating slick slopes, sucking mud, sloppy water crossings, and unfamiliar horses, without a hint of hassle or a single spook. To be perfectly honest, he outdid Ace's abilities as a group-ride trail horse, and this was just his third time on such an outing. He's worked out great at horse shows, too, bringing home lots of blues--first in halter classes and later, in our first ventures being judged under saddle. As was true of the Aceman, Riley's capable of making me proud to be his person. He proved that again on Saturday, even without any ribbons in the equation.

So, maybe I was wrong in thinking I'd never have another horse like Ace again. True, there will never be another Ace, exactly, because he was too uniquely himself to ever be duplicated in full. But I no longer feel bereft of a good all-around horse. Though still just a kid in dependable using-horse terms, Riley's another step closer to filling the old guy's empty shoes.

Tell Me About Your Reading Habits

I'm curious about your reading habits and how they relate to your sources of equine information.

Pre-Internet (if we can even remember such a time), if information didn't come on treeware (paper), we didn't get to read about it. But now that so many of us have access to digital software, there's not much we can't read simply by going on-line. So I'd like to know: Do you still subscribe to horse magazines, or buy them off a newsstand? If so, tell me a little about what you purchase to read, and why. What DON'T you buy to read any more, in terms of magazines? If you feel like explaining why on that point, too, please do.

Seeing as how I'm in the horse-magazine business, it's hard for me to get an unbiased fix on this from my own experience. Basketloads of freebie horse magazines pour into my house every month, and of course, I know what's going into Horse & Rider well before it even goes to press. I don't read any fewer magazines than I did pre-Internet, but I might, if keeping up with the genre weren't part of I do to stay in business.

While you're thinking about your mag-reading habits, I'd also like to know where you practice them. In the living room? In bed? In the bathroom? All the above, plus other?

I've Glimpsed a Swan

Photo at right: Here's Chanel, my yearling QH filly, in April '07. Photo by Diane Rice. (click to enlarge)

For the last couple of months, I've been feeding and handling a yearling filly I bought from a California college student short on money for tuition. The filly, Chanel, arrived looking healthy and perky--and like a ball of fur from one end to the other. She was still in her winter fuzzies, had never had a haircut, and about a hand shorter than most other Quarter Horses of her age. She wasn't quite an ugly duckling, but you had to use your imagination to see all of her potential.

Today, though, I caught a glimpse of a swan. She's dropped most of her winter coat, is sporting her first complete clip job, and is two blanket sizes bigger than when she got here. Blankets off and ready to play, she loped across the arena like a sorrel ballerina, then cast an eye toward me as if to say, "Did you see that? I'm going to be fancy!"

Just another reason why I love to own yearlings. One day they're a weed, the next day they're a rosebud, just about to bloom.

The Antidote to Keyboard Life

There's something about the first weeks of spring that drives people--horse people, at least--away from desks and out into the freshening outdoors. I notice this in the flow of my reader mail, which always drops off from multiple missives per day, to almost nil this time of year. I notice it in myself, too. When I get spare moments, I'd rather be outside, currying a broodmare, digging in my compost pile, touching up the barn's paint, or just listening to birds chirp, than be tapping out articles, blog entries, or e-mails on my computer keyboard.

Take last week, for instance. I gave Chanel, my yearling filly, her first serious trip to the equine beauty parlor. I rode Riley, my 4-year-old gelding, and supervised a reset of his shoes. I lavished grooming time on Gussie, whose next foal is due in a couple of weeks. I pulled enough hair off 28-year-old Tank to line every bird nest in the county. I burned some of last year's garden debris, and cut the grass for the first time this season. I reseeded parts of the pasture. I threatened to clog the washing machine, as happens every year at this time, by laundering too many winter-filthy horse blankets. I lingered outside until after each day's sunset, making lists of the spring-work chores I could think of to do the next day.

I had some fleeting guilty thoughts about my blogging absence. But I assauged them by figuring that you probably were outside, too, soaking up the real world in favor of the one available to us by computer screen.