This and you forgot to factor in the time you spend doing it. It’s a labor of love for my personal horses but I’ll be damned if I’m subsidizing someone else’s fun, while I get stuck with all the work.
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Also, lesson money isnt great unless you have lesson students all day every day, which 2 schoolies cant maintain. You will need more schoolies to have them even come close to covering their own cost.
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Agreed, the trick to a profitable lesson program is low maintenence schoolies who can be used for a wide variety of students; and then carefully planning their work schedule without overusing them and making them sour. I also used to know exactly how many lessons a particular schoolie had to work per month to cover their expenses and what their break even point was.
It is always tempting to take that adorable small pony or the high maintenence retired show horse for the more advanced riders, but it is very tough to schedule them enough to break even.
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I never agree with clanter but here’s an exception. I agree with his “no, hell no.”
Something I also wonder about is if horses are less apt to founder on well-maintained pasture. Sounds counterintuitive, I know. I remember reading some extremely informative posts on Rural Heritage years ago from a woman who held degrees in soil science & equine nutrition. Iirc, she explained that the rough, broadleaf type weeds that tend to grow in the poorly maintained, overgrazed lots commonly used to dry lot horses with metabolic issues contained more sugar than a lot of grasses.
Having raised both goats & pigs & seeing how they favor the coarse, weedy forage for it’s higher sugar levels, I’m inclined to think she was right.
Hmm. Our badly maintained pastures go straight to invasive buttercups which are toxic. Most of the time horses won’t eat them so they take over more and more. However I’ve recently heard of a couple of horses turned out in such pastures, with daily hay feeding of course, dying of liver failure. Cause unknown. I do wonder if they were nibbling buttercups between meals.
We do also get clover in worn out fields with adequate ground water. That is super high calorie.
But all our other invasive broadleaf weeds are unpalatable and some are toxic.
Horses love dandelions but they don’t survive in drylot or wrecked pasture.
I’m in the south, too. The going rate for full boarding at a decent farm is $700+. And I’m in a less expensive area of NC.
