It’s not necessarily an either or - those could be their actual expenses AND they could be charging higher than market rate. Their choice to move to a more expensive property doesn’t entitle them to charge more than what the market will bear. If you set up your business with unrealistic operating expenses you can’t expect clients to make up the difference. That’s a separate problem from the main point of the thread which is that a lot of clients are getting priced out even at a fair market rate, and there’s not much barns can do about that but cater to a wealthier crowd or fold entirely.
4 Likes
I am tired of hearing that the lower end payers are what’s wrong with the world. I never expected any trainer or b.o. to “subsidize” my horse. Just like I never expected, or wanted, them to tell me when I could or couldn’t ride my horse, what to ride him in, where to ride him, etc. I’ve never needed a babysitter, I wanted a horse trainer.
So I won’t subsidize their life style and they don’t need to subsidize mine.
It’s all a mute point for me. I decided after my last horse that the price was too high. The cost and scarcity of veterinary services more so than board/training.
12 Likes
I rode at a place sort of like this - it worked really well for two specific client types.
- the low key pleasure rider with a low maintenance horse that tolerates the weather well naturally, was barefoot, stayed out of trouble, and didn’t need to be kept super fit to plod around on the weekends. The owner did the basics but was not concerned about a little skin scurf/chippy hooves/minor scrapes/coming out of winter just a bit thin
- the hyper-knowledgeable owner who has control issues and lives/works close enough to do night check and lunchtime blanket changes. This owner would give the average vet tech a run for their money, has their own rig to haul out as needed, and either works remotely/flexible schedule or (usually) doesn’t work at all. Basically the ideal BNT client but someone who wants to do the horse care themselves
The issue with this setup as well as any self-care (or straight boarding barn, to an extent)? There are a lot of Client 1s out there that also think the horse can survive a week with no one checking on them/doing chores while Owner is on vacation. There’s a lot of Client 1s who have horses that need Client 2 - harder keepers, accident prone, too smart/untrained to tolerate infrequent handling, etc. And there are a lot of people who THINK they are Client 2, but are actually off in Woo-Woo land and their horses suffer for it, or they simply work too much or live too far away.
The Barn Owner has to decide if they can tolerate a different standard of care as long as the horse isn’t emaciated or dying, and be able to kick people out as needed. A LOT of horse people cannot do either - they end up paying out of their own pocket/time to scrub Pookie’s water trough and apply ointment, or they let a bad client stay for too long for fear of confrontation.
The best owner for a co-op/self-care facility is someone who is extremely business minded and sees horses as assets with a certain criteria of welfare. Unfortunately, the business isn’t profitable enough for many such people to run one!
3 Likes
This is a frustrating thread. People are criticizing trainers and facility owners for not having a good business plan, but when they try in fact to put a good business plan in place where they cover their operating and overhead expenses and maybe more than one dollar an hour salary for themselves, they then get criticized for being entitled and having borders subsidize their hobby horse farm.
For far too long, the model has been “ Well I’ll lose money on boarding but make it up in other services.” The problem is with the middle class being priced out and everything these days not just Horse related coststhey no longer want / can afford those other services, but they still want to have their horse.
I think it’s a very valid point that some operations in the area that are being run and operated by older people where perhaps the mortgage is actually paid off and so they can keep the prices artificially low. However, those people are going to eventually retire. The kids don’t want to do it. It’s gets sold at current market value which means suddenly there’s a mortgage back in place and it’s thousands and thousands of dollars right off the bat that have to be made up in income.
I assure you, facility owners are not being entitled.
14 Likes
I have always been a low end payer. I definitely don’t think low end payers are a “problem.” Anyone who knows me will hear me preach about how everyone in the horse world benefits from having a diversity of socioeconomic backgrounds involved in horse ownership.
But I also get really frustrated when horse owners don’t understand how flipping much it costs to run a farm. I have many solidly middle class friends (like me) who complain about the cost of board and the lack of service or quality they receive. But they want it both ways: they want cheap board with primo service. Something has to give.
Which I why I believe boarding barns that aren’t exclusively catering to the wealthy are going to have to stop trying to offer any services whatsoever. While there are more than one of way of doing things, a horse’s fundamental needs are the same whether they have a wealthy owner or an owner is a more normal tax bracket.
5 Likes
I think this is kind of standard for any self-care or co-op facility, regardless of how it’s set up, no? I’ve never boarded at one like I describe with private paddocks/barns, but I’ve boarded at plenty of others. They work best for very low maintances horses/owners or owners with the luxury of time.
But I also think that’s going to have to change if people are being priced out of boarding.
Because right now, (some) owners are wanting blanket changes and extra meals and night check on top of things like deeply bedded stalls with endless fancy hay and high quality feed. Then they are balking at the barn’s cost to provide those things.
So if they can’t justify the price, they’re going to have to find a way to do it themselves.
I’m probably being naive and optimistic, but I think you could structure a self-care stable in a way that while it may not be turning a huge profit that someone could solely live on, it is at least paying for itself and its upkeep. It wouldn’t be an investment per se, but rather a way to allow a property to self-fund its expense.
But I totally agree that being a barn owner in those situations is tough. Then again, being a barn owner is tough period. It’s one of those “choose your hard” situations IMO.
2 Likes
These places exist, but are almost as rare as unicorns.
It requires just the right mix of horse owners, and even then, it occasionaly degenerates into warfare over “borrowed” hay, feed, and bedding, as well as use and maintenance of common areas.
9 Likes
Oh it is! Which is what I said down the post a bit 
. I did forget to mention that the individual setup helped with squabbling over space and “someone stole my hay” nonsense that can arise in communal setups. But there was still some flack over arena time and people who left jumps out. A good barn manager is essential at any place.
I think you can, if someone is absolutely ruthless about kicking bad clients out and holding everyone to the same standard. Which horse people are not known for 
. Comes back to that good business plan thing this thread has been tossing around.
I also think that a time is coming where the Knowledgeable Horse Owner will be a rare thing indeed. How many people here learned from Pony Club, or a really dedicated instructor who took the time to teach horse care, or from being a barn rat who self-educated as much as possible? Many times before we had a horse of our own, and for far cheaper than anyone can manage today? We lament here on COTH about how few opportunities the next generation has, for very valid reasons.
With the exponential increase in understanding of lameness, biomechanics, nutrition, etc, so has the cost of keeping a horse “serviceably sound” increased. It’s pretty cheap to keep a string of lesson horses sharing the same tack and going 2-3 times a day until they come up three legged-lame. Retirement is expensive - we now can rehab things that used to be fatal, and shipping the foundered camp-pony off to the auction isn’t as acceptable as it used to be (not that anyone was telling the kids that’s where Pookie was “sold”). I say this not as a critique of past “lesson factory” setups so much as from a place of understanding that the industry was able to stay inexpensive because we didn’t know what we didn’t know, and the fact that horses used to be treated less like pets and more like livestock. Trying to go back to the old frameworks that we had also requires lowering the standard of care to a place many (in some ways myself included) will find unacceptable.
So where does that leave us? An industry without a plethora of up-and-coming Knowledgeable Horse Owners to do co-op board, with skyrocketing costs, with higher expectations and lower tolerance for “good enough”, with pressure to keep horses like pets and give up everything (including your 401k) to retire Lame Pookie for a decade instead of putting him down, while the economy wobbles in uncertainty and people’s actual livelihoods are threatened. Of course people are getting out and the pros are catering to the well-off, fully funded clients. Most hobbies are going that way right along with us.
11 Likes
I feel uncomfortably seen (although I would class myself as only reasonably knowledgeable.)
I have been looking for an operation like this, which is probably someone’s back yard, as my horse got older. It would be an ideal setup to move him and his codependent life partner, both retirees. They could share a stall if we left it up to them.
I know a couple of places where this is offered- including a farm a mile from my mom’s where my sister’s horse lived in just this way- but that’s an hour from me before traffic. If you can afford a farmette in my county, you aren’t taking in boarders!
5 Likes
It is hard to bandy around hard set numbers for what is acceptable profitable sustainable board rates. I live in Florida. I guarantee I probably pay three times the amount of a lot of different places for a three string bale of quality hay. Made my bimonthly hay run today. I drive an hour because locally that same bale is $10-12 more than if I travel to pay $42.95. At a hay exchange. In Florida, you rarely see people putting up hay that they bought once or twice a year. Most buy weekly or bimonthly or monthly. I would guess besides land and space that is our biggest expense.
Anyway. This is the same forum that champions 24 seven turn out. Or free choice Hay. Quality feed. Exceptional Farrier Care. Exceptional vet care. And a great deal of places in our country land is at a premium Especially open land. Easier to build 400 houses. Then it is to have beautiful pasture.
Of course things can be done cheaper. But in an ideal world, that’s what we all strive for. And that costs money.
To me the doing less… Kind of article is not for you or I. I think that ship has sailed
I am lucky enough to have bought my own small farm 25 years ago I would say I’m solidly upper middle class I have one competing horse who I do all the work for myself and only show locally The other two are retirees.
And I am struggling
And that’s another thing we keep talking about middle class. What exactly is that number anymore? Especially regarding horses. Or where you live.
Sorry, I know this is a stream of consciousness. It just feels like we’re talking about a myriad of different locations, different expectations and different capabilities financially.
8 Likes
And this is the issue where I live. There are tons of private farms with beautiful facilities and empty stalls, and nobody wants a boarder.
4 Likes
I’ve never been a b.o. so I haven’t had to deal with these owners some of you are posting about. But I’ve only been in a trainers program when I first started riding in hunters. Once I got the gist of it I left, I didn’t like the control the trainer wanted over my horse.
2 Likes
This is an outstanding response.
I said up thread. I’m jaded and I really am. I keep thinking of all the minutiae that breaks your back.
Pookie destroys a waterer and now it’s not $25 to replace it. It’s $50. And I can’t even blame the orange one’s tariffs on that those were the cost a couple of years ago. Plus the cost of stripping the entire stall, the wasted shavings and re-bedding the stall because it flooded when Pookie broke it in the middle of the night and we didn’t find it until the next morning.
Clients who work during the day and have to ride at night and during the winter it gets dark at five so that means the lights are on and electric bills triple. Should I assess a $100 per month premium to those clients who have to work and therefore can only ride at night during the winter? I think not.
Those are but two small examples. There are 100s more.
12 Likes
I do think we are talking about many issues. The general cost of horsekeeping. The cost of competing. The cost of being a working professional. The cost of being a barn owner. I think we’re comparing apples to orangutans. A middle-aged adult who works full-time and enjoys their horse either at home or at a boarding barn is vastly different than an up-and-coming kid that does twice weekly lessons or vastly different than the ambitious Junior on the Florida circuit riding two leased horses. So what’s the common denominator? Because we are throwing in a whole bunch of extra extraneous situations on top of that. And I think the article is written from a very narrow perspective.
7 Likes
While I was in vet school, I lived on a breeding farm.
Shortly before I lived there, the owner took in some boarders to help pay for her indoor.
They mostly worked days, so rode in the evening, necessitating the lights (sodium vapor and $$$$ to run.)
J. was ok with that, but they’d leave the damned lights on when they were done.
So she put a “lights out by 9 PM” notice up, and when that was ignored, had a timer installed on the breaker box that cut the juice to the indoor lights at 9 PM.
.
Put up a notice to that effect.
Also told the boarders that, since they had weekends off, they could ride during the day on Sat/Sun, and no lights at all on those days.
Less than a week later, one of the boarders had a hissy fit about how she was “nearly killed” when the lights went out at 9.
.
Early mornings, after feeding, Joyce would turn out the boarders.
She’d pop home from her job and switch the boarders and her own horses early afternoon.
In spite of the assertion that, since they all worked M-F 9-5, they had to ride at night, she’d routinely get home at the end of the day to see that her own horses were back in their stalls, and the boarders’ horses were back out.
She put her foot down and told them that had to stop.
.
One of the boarders was a reasonably good friend, and let J. know that the boarders had called a meeting–in the tack room one evening–to discuss drawing up a set of “demands”. (J. was not invited.)
J. nonetheless walked in and casually mentioned that she’d heard the boarders were unhappy, and what was the problem?
Boarders hemmed and hawed, and produced their list.
J. smiled and told them they had a week to get the hell out.
They said she couldn’t do that.
She laughed.
Told them she’d recently paid off the loan for the indoor, and she certainly could.
.
They departed in a huff, with loud protestations about how they were “family”, and the group leased a small barn nearby, which they were going to run as a co-op, and everything would be perfect.
The co-op arrangement lasted less than a year, and by all accounts, the “family” was at each others’ throats for much of it.
19 Likes
A hobby horse farm owner should never purchase a backyard horse property with the plan of having a few boarders subsidize it. That is horrible financial advice.
What people are pointing out is if you raise the price of board to what you think it should cost, there will be no more boarding barns. Then what will the barn owners with mortgages do?
7 Likes
Sell to developers
This sentence can also be phrased, if you don’t raise the price of board to what it actually costs, there will be no more boarding barns.
12 Likes
I would argue that they are charging market value. Market value is whatever the market will bear. So if they raise prices and people keep paying it, it doesn’t matter what other barns charge. It’s why companies like Ferrari can charge more than Ford. Perceived value by the market.
5 Likes
I do not doubt there are facility owners out there that are actually hobby horse operations. They think they can bring in a border or two and offset their own costs.
That was not me. I bolded your word think. I did an LROP. That alone should tell you it was not a casual backyard operation. That stands for long range operating plan. That told me in 2020 that my expenses were far exceeding my income to the point where my CPA and I got together and we disallowed many expenses in certain years so that I could FORCE a profit and keep the IRS off my back.
And we were full. I had 20 horses in here. Going to all the local and further afield shows. I now have zero and have leased the facility. I use the phrase up thread “Boulevard of broken dreams. “
I’m actually not picking you as much as it might seem. But I think there is a harsh reckoning about to come down on the middle class horse owners. I’m seeing it all the time in my local area. Barns that were never empty with a waiting list are now posting availability on social media.
11 Likes
I don’t understand this at all. Some properties have income-producing assets on them. Maybe it’s an apartment that’s rented out. Maybe it’s established fruit trees. Maybe it’s a kennel for dog boarding and training. It’s perfectly normal to purchase a property with the idea that the assets may offset (“subsidize”) the purchase payments. Why wouldn’t horse boarding be the same?
I have my own farm. I don’t board. If I did, I would set a price that makes it worth my while, and any money made above and beyond expenses incurred by the boarded horse(s) would certainly go toward paying for something, “subsidizing” my own horse expenses or a car payment or my retirement fund. I’m not sure why that’s offensive.
11 Likes
