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I think their costs per horse are wildly underestimated - but they don’t include insurance, mortgage, electricity, maintenance of farm, etc etc. Very worrying…
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yeah, $163 per horse is a JOKE
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I pay about $180 a month for feed and bedding at my self board barn. Horse uses very little bedding as she poops in her runout paddock. My vitamin and mineral supplement is about $50 a month. Easy keeper, 15 lbs of Timothy a day.
The stall rental is $200 a month however.
That sum on the EC sheet is just feed forage and bedding. And it’s an average. But I would not call feed forage and bedding all the operational costs for a commercial barn. Indeed they are the least which is why folks by and large don’t make a profit even charging $700 a month.
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as per normal EC’s survey triggered a lot of WTF? questions among the horse community. They do make attractive infographics but unfortunately they seem to have accomplished very little of benefit to the average horse person in the last few years.
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Oh I don’t know they make very spirited attempts to snatch more money from our wallets. The coaching fee fiasco to start with. :-). Agreed EC doesn’t represent us very well at all. Not sure they would even recognize a horse five times out of ten.
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I think it’s pretty clear that the average includes a LOT of pasture-boarded horses (no bedding, likely living on hay only with no concentrates). As well, some farms grow their own hay, which would be less expensive than purchasing hay (and I don’t know how it was reported - if a farm grows its own hay, does it include that as a cost?).
I wanted to go through the survey to look at the questions, but I’m not a barn owner so didn’t want to submit false data just to see what was asked.
This is JUST the cost of feed and bedding for the AVERAGE horse. NOT grain, NOT supplements, NOT farrier, NOT board, NOT fencing, etc. And not necessarily a Warmblood.
I live in CA - it is hardly cheap here. My current hay provider has NICE orchard for $19, and NICE orchard/alfalfa for $18. Their prices will come down when they start harvesting this year’s hay. Those are 3 strand bales - so about 110 to 120/bale. The AVERAGE horse (not a Warmblood) will do fine on 15 to 20 lbs/day. I always figured a bale would last me 5 days/horse. If I bought over the Summer, the prices were about $2/bale less. So even using high prices, 6 bales is $114. Add a bag of ration balancer, $25, and a couple of bales of shavings for the run-in shelter, and even in Calfornia, I’m not much above that.
And -how many of those horses in that average are on pasture? Which means costing almost nothing to feed and bed?
HOWEVER, add in supplements, farrier, fence repairs, labor to clean the pastures, and suddenly I’ve doubled my costs. Forget about the vet :eek: Or arena maintenance, or property taxes, or all the other costs of keeping a horse at home. And if they aren’t home - you are paying board - and that is priced to cover ALL those costs too.
Its all in the details.
