Missouri Equine Council

This weekend was the annual Missouri Equine Council event held at Midway Expo Center. This year there seemed to be more participants than last year and the clinicians were exceptional. This year MFA sponsored a "Road To The Horse" type event where three trainers started a three year old colt and took them through an obstacle course after 3 hours of training.

We saw old friends and met some new ones as well. It is nice to visit events like this just to keep in touch with folks that we know but hardly see during the non show seasons.

A Day With our Trainer

Last Wednesday I spent a couple of hours with our trainer and rode our filly that he is riding for us. What a difference! I was really amazed at how far this filly has progressed in just a month of training. I have scheduled some time each week to visit with the trainer and learn more hand and body control so that I can ride this filly after she returns home. I am the one that needs a tune up!!!

Lovely Day To Ride

What a wonderful day it was to ride today! I worked with our colt in the round pen for a session and then saddled up one of our fillies that has not been ridden in a couple of weeks. The colt's session went really well and I hope that I can start him under saddle in the next couple of weeks as he is slated to be our futurity prospect this year. Just after I saddled up the filly and started out of the drive to ride down the road, our builder showed up to talk about house plans so I postponed the ride. After the builder left my oldest daughter and I headed out to ride, so she saddled up her gelding and we went to the round pen to warm up for a few minutes. My cell rang and I was not able to ride today. My daughter had a really good ride while I was on the phone, but after an hour on the phone I decided to unsaddle and take care of barn chores for the evening. If the weather holds out and stay descent I will ride a couple of times this week.

Follow up to the "Corn" posting

Ok so I did some research about the hoof that I worked on last week. I found documentation from a book that I own that indicates a horse can get "Corn's" in their hoofs like people get on their feet.

Correcting a Toed In Fault

Well I worked on a horse today that toes in on the near side today. The neat thing about working on some of these faults is that I get to see a difference between a level and balance trim vs a little bit of a modified trim. I took a fraction more of the hoof off of the inside and it moves the hoof slightly back to center when the horse puts weight on the front foot. It worked out well for this horse.

Another Horse Under The Weather

Well we had the vet out to look at our stud colt last week and last night one of our performance prospects for this year cut her near side front fetlock. I don't think that this filly will be able to compete until mid summer as this will take a couple of months to heal.

Is that a Corn in that Hoof?

I visited with one of my clients yesterday to trim their horses. They have an aged mare that had a really neat object in her hoof that I have never seen before. I am going to do some research and post a comment or two related to it on our blog. Here is the story....

Right now it is very muddy around most barns in central Missouri and I am not sure if this has anything to do with this hoof anomaly or not. After the young lady cleaned the mud off her horses foot by placing each foot in a bucket and then scrubbing I got to go to work. First I checked to make sure that I was getting some heel growth back, as under run heels is an issue, and to our surprise we had about an 1/8" or so of growth to the heel and about a 1/4" of growth to the toe. This was really exciting as usually this mare has all toe growth and no heel growth at all. So I started to prep the foot to trim the toe I noticed what looked like a dried up abscess in the quarter area of the hoof. This pea shaped growth split the white line and was half in the hoof wall and half in the sole. At first I was wondering if it was a dried up abscess , however this mare has not shown any signs of soreness or lameness over the winter at all. I continued to work on the foot wondering if removing the "hard Pea" from her sole would cause any lameness, but it didn't. As she walked away she did not demonstrate any signs or symptoms consistent with being sore in that foot.

Not knowing exactly what this "thing" is I am going to do some more investigating and will post my results on our blog for you to read more about.

Trip to the Trainers

We went to visit a 3 yrd old that we sent off the the trainers yesterday. The filly looked as if she has grown a couple of inches while away. You know the proverbial "The check is in the mail" feeling, well I know this must be how Mike felt yesterday. I can tell that he has been riding her a lot as soon as I walked in the door due to the muscular toning on her hocks. However Mike being the good trainer that he has demonstrated for us the progress they have made. When he took the filly in to his round pen and started to lunge her she was acting really fresh for us. She put on quite the show, arching her back, crow hopping and squealing all the way around the pen. I know Mike felt that sinking feeling cause I could see it in his face, but after a while she settled into the session and life went back to normal.. LOL....

AQHA Sanctioned Sort

Well tomorrow is the first AQHA sort of the new year at McNail arena and I am not ready. I have not ridden at all this past week so I think I will have to skip the event.

:0(

What a weather week

Well the weather has finally started to settle down and is getting back to normal. After a day or two of 70 degree the temperature has turned back to 30's and 40's and January is looking more like January.

Is that Dun Colt turning Blue?

Our Dun colt is feeling blue today... :o(

Over the last couple of days our colt has been beside himself, looking rather gloomy if you ask me. I had the vet out this morning just to make sure that I was not missing something. He got a clean bill of health, with I could same the same for my wallet, from the vet.

Feeling Blue

Today has been one of those days that you would rather stay inside and watch the mist collect on the window.

Our stud colt gave me the look when I put him out in the misty weather this morning. He had that look that my children frequently give me when I ask them to do something they do not want to do, I had to laugh....

I don't think I am going to make the weakly trip to McNail arena to "Team Sort" tonight. I think that I will load up one of my horses and make the trip to Midway arena to Rope instead.

Bad Weather

The weather in central Missouri has turn bad today, the hail - rain - and wind forced us to bring our horses in early today.

Feeling of Satisfaction

Sunday was one of those days that made me remeber why we decided to get into the Equine industry. We have an Arabian filly for sale, she is really nice and broke to ride, and two families traveled from there homes on the west side of Missouri to our farm to look at her. Both of these families have young children looking for that special first horse and I am excited that we were considered. I was very pleased that this filly was willing and able to perform for both families without any issues, this makes me feel like I am doing a good job starting our stock.

A Full Day

Well Sunday started out as most days do, I cleaned stalls, fed and watered the horses. Since I had two families comming to ride one of our horses for sale I decided to grade the dirt by the barn so that it would be better to walk across. The grading worked but I got sucked into some mud and the bucket on the tractor caught the side of the barn and riped a hole in the metal. Woops.... I will add replacing the section of metal to my list of chores. :0)

WHOA.....

I have been riding a buckskin filly that we bought last summer. From the time that we bought her until just recently I was riding her in an "O Ring" snaffle bit, she started throwing her head so I went back to a snaffle. Now every time I ride her in the snaffle she is a total pain in my back side. No matter how much I work on softening her mouth and getting her to flex at the pole, she is really resisting me. If I ride her for ten or so minutes she mellows out and gets to work, but boy I am not sure how to get over this hump.

:9(

Awesome Time

Well the conference has come and gone for one more year. I did not know but the conference has been around since 1979, pretty good longevity. My presentation was a success, turn out was good and there was a lot of questions. This year I was asked if I would consider being part of the advisory committee for the next year, I agreed. I hope that next year is better than the previous.

Friday January 4th 2008

This is an annual conference put on by the University of Missouri. This conference is centered around a user community of farmers that are finding new ways to integrate computers into their operations. Today I will be presenting on the topic of Search Engines, I believe that knowing how to use a search engine to find information will help folks understand how to market on the Search Engines.