They are everywhere so no need to cater to them…
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I hate everything about this thread, because it’s the honest truth and it’s not a good outlook for the equine industry.
I’m truly shocked we still have as many owners as we do. I split my guys and writing the board check compared to my mortgage each month pains me.
Boarding facility owners should be able to make a living. But I don’t see a future where it’s truly possible, unless you’re operating at huge economies of scale - and even then, it’s miniscule.
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I am starting to think that we have entered the era where a person has to be upper middle class or wealthy to even think about affording a riding horse. Let me refine this a little further, an upper middle class person may be able to comfortably afford supporting a horse at a decent stable, maybe two horses, but any more than that may require the person to be wealthy, not just very well off.
This is the inevitably eventual consequence of our rapidly expanding population. There are more humans who need to eat, and grain is used a lot directly or indirectly for human food. This means that horse food WILL cost more even not considering the price of land or transporting the horse food. When you add in the additional cost for land (they are not making any more of it and there are more humans), the lack of fertilizer plus all the problems with the climate all equine costs are going to skyrocket.
In one way I am lucky that my Multiple Sclerosis got me out of owning horses since I could not do the work any more. Looks like that will end up saving me a lot of money.
Personal pleasure horses are a luxury item now.
I now pay for riding, supporting one of the few local stables that has a decent assortment of lesson horses. I contribute various things I think the riding program can use (bits, bridles, saddle pads etc.), I scour this forum for knowledge I think my riding teacher can use to make her students more successful, when I read equitation books I look for descriptions she can use, and I am always thanking her for just being around and letting me ride at her place.
I still miss owning horses, but right now I am glad that the costs of supporting my luxury animals isn’t skyrocketing this year since I no longer own any animals. The world was barely supporting the human population before Putin took two of the biggest “grain baskets” out of production and greatly limited the selling of fertilizer.
We may be in for a world of hurt.
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As a BO I worry about this too. I have a great “barn family,” just wonderful boarders and I don’t want to price them out of horses.
I will say that the cash flow issue matters. I certainly intend to make a profit, but if one of my sales horses goes lame or something (I’m an amateur so no lessons for me, but everything I own except my 27 yo pony and donkey are for sale for the right price), or I make improvements…I can justify the boarding barn to the IRS and the depreciation on the long-term improvements (I built a new barn and indoor 2 years ago) is a welcome tax break.
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I agree. I now pay $1,100/month in Oregon for board for our show horses. They get great care – but it’s gone up by $300 in the last year. We board retired horses at home, so I understand the costs have gone up, but it’s crazy.
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I think that unfortunately this is prescient. I wish it were not so.
Horses are becoming more and more complicated and expensive to manage. Losing even a place to put them - especially a place in reasonable commuting distance of where many horse people work and live - could definitely be a barrier that greatly decreases horse ownership in future generations.
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Where I live, statistically a comparatively high rate of horse ownership, shoestring horse owners were once common. There was plenty of green pasture and the horse mostly lived on grass, with a small herd, a minimal shelter, and hay in winter. Lots of room to ride and gain experience over variable terrain.
Until the 1990’s in my area there were dozens of rural property owners who offered pasture board. Easy to find in the classifieds, with good people who were horse-experienced. It was just something rural people did to bring in a little money to cover their own minimal horse expenses.
Plus, there were probably at least a dozen boarding stables ranging from basic to luxury. Most were located within 15-20 minutes of the city limits.
It’s almost all gone now, even though the local population has more than doubled. Almost no property owners are willing to have strangers keeping horses on their pastures, regardless of income from fees. Most of the few boarding barns are poorly maintained and run, barely adequate in terms of horse care. The local rescue regularly gets anonymous complaints about them. But they are usually not quite bad enough to get a sheriff to take action.
The small handful of quality-care show-standard board barns cost as much as a small apartment for a single horse, and keep an endless waiting list. I think there are about 5 of these barns, they are not large, and by my reckoning they house a total of less than 50 horses across all of them. And they have modest facilities compared with those closer to major metro areas.
Horse owners moving in from other areas sometimes find there simply is not a place available for their horse at the time of their arrival. They end up on a waiting list, with their horse having been left to continue boarding wherever they came from, until they can scrounge a place for it to live locally.
More and more serious horse owners are concluding they have to live on a farmette and keep their horse at home. Farmettes are seriously expensive, though. And there is all the responsibility of the farm and care. And they don’t have an arena or much room to ride. And there is the greater commute to work over living in town, plus finding vacation care.
So yeah, those are serious barriers to horse ownership. In this area that is statistically one of the denser horse areas of the US.
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This is a whole other conversation but I just had to point out, we have MORE than enough resources in this world to go around to our population, but our capitalist system commodifies those resources so most of it goes to waste and/or is hoarded by individuals with an absurd amount of wealth.
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I agree with you.
Maybe I should have said that in today’s economic distribution system we are reaching a Malthusian disaster partially because of the stupidity of some rulers and partially because of climate changes. We have been merrily bopping along handling challenges, but Putin threw a huge monkey-wrench into the economic system that had supported a hefty minority in a prosperous manner.
The rich won’t have to worry about all of this. The rest of us will have to adapt to survive, hopefully still riding and owning the wonderful horses.
My husband had to buy a business vehicle yesterday. He has one, but it has been in the shop for several weeks waiting for a part manufactured in, wait for it, Ukraine. He went to the Toyota dealership and they had NO new cars for sale and their new car garage was empty. Manufacturers of new cars cannot build new cars because of the lack of a wiring harness, made in Ukraine. Luckily they had a suitable used vehicle he could buy.
Putin has greatly magnified existing weaknesses in our present economic system which was already starting to reel dealing with the very large populations of humans on our planet. He has effectively removed two of Earth’s largest “grain baskets” from producing food AND cut badly needed fertilizers that the rest of the world’s “grain baskets” need to produce enough food for us and our domesticated animals.
Horses are going to end up being even more expensive to feed. I recommend buying smaller horses from food efficient breeds, ponies, Arabs, and lines in other breeds that tend to “pork up”, horses that do not NEED several pounds of grain products a day just to go on living and who can get by on less pasture and hay.
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Let’s avoid getting too caught up in a discussion of how politics affects economy, etc., as that’s better suited for Current Events than H/J.
Thanks!
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I apologize.
Still very interesting thoughts, though, @Jackie_Cochran!
I didn’t even put two and two together with increasing grain costs and current events… And we’ve been bemoaning getting quality hay let alone hay at a decent price. H’o boy, this is going to be a tough year for the majority of horse owners. TBH I’m feeling more inclined now to ask for that raise at work to help offset the increased board costs I know are likely going to hit soon.
Go figure I have the one who does need those several pounds of grain a day (and a whole lot of alfalfa, hay, and supplements) to keep weight on. 
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I can nominate the fjord breed for this list. As much as I wish I could keep him on more turnout and give him free access to hay (both of which I could do at my barn now), I simply cannot without detriment to his health 
. Not bad for keeping down those costs though. Little bit of beet pulp/flax to carry CTPlus and limited hay does the trick.
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Come on.
I run a $60m a year business and the vast majority of our contracts have a 30 day term for convenience.
It still specifies what we are obligated to deliver and by when, what the client’s responsibilities are, what our limits of warranty and liability, etc are.
Property leases, which affect balance sheets and tax liabilities, are completely different than service agreeements.
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I see a couple things happening here that are causing some consternation: firstly, I think board increases overall are generally warranted due to increased cost. 1-3% per year, or however it shakes out makes sense. In order for a barn to combat having to pass on increased costs to clients would be to expand the business and get enough break point discounts in their own supply chain that individual client prices would not increase in the same way as a simple inflation increase. Of course, that is not possible usually because land/lumber prices and scarcity of land.
Secondly, you know, this is a business. I’m a bit confused by the BO/BM rhetoric of “it’s no one’s business why/how/when I increase costs. Generally, a business-client relationship should allow for some negotiation and discussion. No emotions need to really be involved. I can ask my general contractor why he is charging more for my reno than he did last year and we can have a frank discussion about it without feelings getting hurt and emotions coming into play. We are both adults who either run or work in businesses and understand that discussions around money can be informative and help us each better understand eachother. But that comes from experience and training in business matters. I get that BO/BM maybe don’t have a lot of good training in this arena.
Thirdly, you mentioned being taken advantage of in the past. I totally get this. So you want to do your due diligence to insure that isn’t happening again, and we all know how common that is in this mostly unregulated industry which is widely known to have a lack of checks and balances and mostly dependent on blind trust and word of mouth. And as a client of this barn, I absolutely think it is fair for you to open up a discussion about this topic. Yes, BO generally don’t make much profit on board alone, but it’s up to them as business owners to drive revenues in various ways so they can stay afloat if they truly want to be in this business (lessons, training, grooming, clinic venue, pony parties, camps, etc). I think it’s wildly unfair to put that frustration of not earning enough on board back onto boarders if the BO isn’t choosing to explore other avenues of revenue. If they strictly want to do board only, then that is their choice, but why be angry about it?
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Really? You’re correct in saying this is a business. So when you go to the grocery store, the dry cleaner, your attorneys office, out to dinner, do you question their pricing? Why should this be any different for barn owners or horse trainers? And the idea that barn owners or managers don’t have much experience in business is making a pretty broad assumption.
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Why can’t pursuing other revenue streams simply consist of charging enough for board to cover actual costs plus some sort of income?
When I board my dog it’s $40 per day. Horse boarding requires so much more in land and infrastructure and yet it costs a tiny fraction of that per day. Makes no sense.
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I have owned horses since 1976. I have kept them at home for the last 31 years. My husband makes a decent living but the truth is that if I had to board I could not afford it. I would be horseless.
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I’m a bit in the middle, here, too. Of course no one HAS to tell someone why they are increasing costs. And certainly I would NEVER, EVER, EVER expect to negotiate with the BM over how much she is charging for her services. That’s rude and isn’t how services like boarding work.
On the other hand, whenever the person I’m boarding with has raised prices, at any place I’ve been, they have provided a reason. Always, and pretty much always in written form, distributed to the boarders.
I’ve appreciated it, and never questioned it…well, there was the place where the owner hated having boarders (she told me this) so she started tacking on extra charges, like $25 to have your horse’s halter removed. Ever. Inside or out. And she started charging $5 when I was giving my two horses my own hay before I left because it “made the stalls messier.” It was in hay nets, so not actually very messy, but when I asked what she would prefer instead she said she didn’t like nets because they were “too hard to fill.”
Anyway, the point I was trying to make before I took myself down a horrible memory lane, is that it’s nice to get some explanation for a change in rates, and I’ve never felt anything but appreciative. I was taken aback by how many BOs seemed to find it objectionable someone would want to know why rates were being raised.
I happen to know how much hay and grain and shavings cost, and all of the other semi-hidden expenses of a farm, but a lot of people who board probably have no idea. Why would they? I think at times like these, when everything, everywhere is increasing in cost it’s a little silly the average person wouldn’t automatically understand that inflation is hitting us all. But in more normal times, your average boarder probably has no clue how much a bag of Triple Crown Senior costs, or when it goes up in price, how many bales of timothy the barn goes through, and so on.
ETA: I also don’t think most people know that boarding horses doesn’t make money for the vast majority of operations. Lessons, sales, etc., yes, but not boarding. I only know this fact because I’ve been close friends with my trainers/BOs over the years, worked full time at barns, and so on. But again, I don’t think the average person has a clue about this, so while the BO doesn’t have to explain, and doesn’t owe anyone anything, I guess it isn’t surprising that people who have no idea how the finances of horse boarding work would wonder why their board rate went up (again, except for right now, because unless you live off the grid AND in a cave, everything costs more).
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The idea that increases in board must be “warranted” is something that keeps getting repeated here, yet it is entirely incorrect. A board increase does not have to be justified by some reason that you approve of. It doesn’t have to be “warranted” by anything at all.
Oh, really? Do you think your business relationship with your doctor or hair stylist or the guy who owns the feed store should “allow for some negotiation?” Yeah, I can see it now:
Bob at the feed store: The price of your feed has gone up $5/bag.
You: Now, Bob, we really need to have a discussion and negotiate just how much more I’m going to pay you for feed.
Now that’s just crazy talk, there. If your vet told you she was going to have to raise her prices, you really think it’s appropriate to say, “Now, Anne, if you can’t make enough money on large animal work, then you need to open up a clinic and do small animals every evening because the profit margin is higher. Then you won’t need to raise your prices on large animal work.” That’s just nuts.
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