This has been building for 25 years.
The problem is that the cost of land has become prohibitive. That produced several things,
- When I was a kid (1980s, NorCal) trainers owned they farms. They could make board a “loss leader” because they had the real estate investment. When they got tired, and perhaps hadn’t saved a lot while working, they sold the farm and retired on the proceeds.
That’s fine, but you can only do that once. And what that looked like was
- In the rich (and credit rich) 1990s or so, the only people who hung onto their farms were those who had finished paying mortgages for them. Or people who made gobs of money in the dot.com world bought hobby farms.
In both cases, board could be a loss leader (of sorts) because there wasn’t a note to pay. Or rather, you couldn’t feasibly plan to borrow in order to run a boarding facility. The landless HOs would simply go to a barn already paid for and pay less.
Some people could undercharge because they considered themselves to be making money if the cost of their horses were covered. The mortgage they did pay on the hobby farm they considered a sunk cost. And many people had boarding businesses so that they could borrow and write off large improvements like indoor arenas that they wanted, but could not have bought for themselves with after-tax dollars.
Think about how many pros now lease stalls vs. how many owned the farm in yestercentury. So that segment of the industry is getting poorer, too. After all, what will the aging horse trainer do for a retirement fund if he/she never had the farm to cash in?
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The earning power of individuals, by and large, has gone down since the 1970s. We didn’t feel the pinch when both parents started working outside the home. But that rise in the cost of living would catch up with us, sooner or later. The middle class has been slowly getting priced out of owning horses for a long time. The sharp increase in the cost of college (or health care or retirement, any of those big life expenses) put the final nail in the coffin for many families who, a generation earlier, would have been well-off enough to also feed a horse.
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For those who owned farms outright and couldn’t/didn’t want to sell out, it made sense to slash prices. After all, it’s an expensive asset that can’t just sit there and make money or even pay for itself. You either run a boarding barn and at least make it break even, or you lose money as the farm deteriorates.
I will tell you that where I am (Oregon’s Willamette Valley) this has been the trend since the 2008 recession. It would make no economic sense to open a boarding barn here unless the farm was already paid for. And you can’t sell a big, 35 stall place.
ETA, 4.5: One of these big, mega-boarding places at 35 stalls would cost between $900K and $1.2M here, depending on your proximity to Portland (our money-generating metropole). (And by the way, back when I was a kid, one trainer could have filled all 35 stalls). If you were to sink that money into`that farm, you’d probably have to lease out stalls to a few smaller trainers. That’s work. Worse case scenario (as has happened here), you have a mixture of individual boarders (perhaps even doing self-care) and pros who lease a block of stalls.
If you had enough sense to make around $1M, why would you use that money to buy a farm that promised you lots of work and no return for your effort to run the boarding part of it?
- The horse-loving middle class wants to hang on, and so do the people who own these farms. So they agree to underpay until there’s nothing left of the industry.
And now they complain that they can’t get good help or try to avoid paying their workers and OK wage and all the taxes that go with them. The trend here is toward a lot of self-care and co-op barns, just as a way to cope with labor costs.
Having been on both sides of this business and chosen where I lived based on my ability to pay at least middle-of-the-market horse board, I have always thought that the HOs were being unwise to keep doing their part to drive down board prices, particularly what we were willing to pay for skilled labor.
Anyone who thinks she’s saving money and getting superior care driving to the barn to deliver self-care is either living in a very bad market and doing OK by her horse…. or is fooling herself about the savings of money and the quality of the care (and facility) she’s getting. I say that as someone who is in a partial care barn and going out there more than 1x/day 7 days a week. And I still don’t think my horses are cared for as well as they would have been in a barn in more sophisticated market 20 years ago. Our local boarding scene has been so whittled down to basics that you can’t get great full care for any price. Folks just don’t know what that looks like…. or can’t find enough people who would be willing to pay for it.
I draw from having boarded horses in big boarding barns, private little barns and training barns in the SF Bay Area, rural NY metropolitan NY/CT and now Oregon.
Sorry for the long exegesis. I have thought about this a lot and wondered what my part was in helping to create bad care for horses. My point is that there are causes…. but they are such fixtures in the boarding industry…. we have been underpaying for so long… that I think the OP is right: You’d have to really jack up prices. Or, as is more likely, you can’t unwind the effect of economic changes that took 25 years.
