What Does It Take To Be A Successful Horse Breeder?
Being a successful horse breeder means wearing a lot of hats, instead of just being someone who knows how to get mares to drop healthy foals on a regular basis. You also have to have business acumen, marketing savvy and be able to prioritize many tasks. You also have to kiss regular sleep goodbye. You also have to be able to endure a lot of heartbreak and disillusionment. If you don't love horses, you shouldn't be a horse breeder.
Marketing Savvy
Not only do you need to know horses, but you need to make your horses marketable. If you have a stallion, you want to get the word out about why he should be the one to father the next generation. Modern horse breeders also need to have web sites, make horse breeding videos to promote their stallions or other horses for sale, and have good customer relation skills.
You need to know the industry and know which publications, horse shows and web sites to concentrate your advertising. You could hire someone to do all of the marketing and promotion, but in the current economic climate, many horse breeders are faced with no choice except to do it themselves.
Physical Demands
It is only a very slim minority of horse breeders that do all of the research and planning of the horse breeding and then have other employees do all of the hard work involved in taking care of horses. Most horse breeders have to do a majority of the physical labor themselves. They will most certainly have grooms and other employees, but often they will have to do a lot of the work themselves.
Horses are very labor-intensive animals. They need their stalls cleaned, to be fed and to be watered every day, no matter what the weather and how your health is. If their water trough or buckets are frozen, you have to chip them with an ice pick so they can drink. For successful horse breeders, the needs of the horse always come first.
Being busy and physically active can help horse breeders deal with the emotional roller-coaster that horse breeding can put you on. You become emotionally and financially entwined with these fragile and sensitive animals. You can spend years breeding, raising, training and showing a promising colt and then, just as they are getting ready for a lucrative career at stud, they suddenly die of colic.
Knowing there are other horses that need taking care of helps you to get over the profound loss and make you realize that tomorrow is another day with another horse waiting for you.
