Gifts

As we began our daily chores in the relative cool of the first morning light, I thought again (as I often do) about what a gift it is to work with one's spouse in the same place that one lives. I understand that for many people this might be more of a curse than a gift, but for truly getting to know someone (and at times truly testing the strength of your marriage) there is no equal in my opinion and I wouldn't change a thing about it !




I spent most of my adult life, including most of my first marriage, working away from home in addition to working and farming at home. I can tell you from experience that this can quickly turn into a nightmare if you and your spouse don't share the same end goals, but it sure works a treat when you DO share the same end goals ! It is only recently that I have transitioned from two full time jobs down to being here on the farm full time (which I count as one full time job!). It's very nice to be able to take the time to stop and smell the roses occasionally instead of rushing past them in an endlessly futile quest to try and get it all done. If you have noticed more of my posts on this blog of late, I don't mind sharing that this is one of my attempts at allowing Melissa an opportunity to take a little time for herself. After writing nearly 300 posts and keeping up with our many clients every day along with shouldering the lion's share of the daily farm work for a very long time, I'd say she deserves it.



As Melissa will readily share with anyone who will listen (and as she warns everyone who passes the threshold of our home), I am not much for maintaining order inside our house. She half jokingly says that after years of living with me, I have broken her. I'll admit there is a lot of truth in that statement. In spite of my quirky household habits, I don't run my farm that way at all. I was raised among good farmers and those of them who read this blog will be pleased to know some of their lessons actually did rub off on me ! As a general rule I'm not very much fun to be around and I don't have much time to stop and visit unless my animals are happy, my fences are fixed, my weeds are controlled (no more buttercups !), my pastures are fertilized and kept appropriately mowed, my buildings are trim and painted, and my equipment is maintained. Thankfully, most of the items on my list have been tended to over the past few weeks, and I am about to turn my full attention toward our new farm ! Hope everyone is having a great Sunday !

(post written by Jason - again!)

Mr. O'Reilly standing outside one of the sheds
Thomas
Trigger grazing in front of the pond
Tony and Hemi

Apollo and Ivan

Winston

Faune and Sebastian; Faune is a Selle Francais and just shy of 18 hands and Sebi is a Connemara/Irish Draught cross and is about 15.2 hands. They make a cute pair!

Lucky and Lightening

Hemi, Chance and Leo just hanging out

Lucky, Clay and Silky

About Us Part I

About Us. Part 1 (in other words, who are you people anyway ?)

(This post written by Jason) Several people have asked for more information about us over the last several weeks and we are happy to oblige.

Q: Tell us a little bit about yourselves individually and your history prior to your marriage.

A: Jason was born and raised near Bowmanville, Ontario, Canada on the north shore of Lake Ontario about 50 miles east of Toronto. I graduated from the University of Guelph. I worked in the livestock feed industry for several years after graduation from college. I also moved back home after buying a portion of our multi-generation family farm from my dad’s estate. We quickly grew the farm into a viable business and I (and my then wife) built a home just up the road from my mom. Unexpectedly, my wife left me a couple of years after this, and when I discovered why we were quickly divorced. A few days after she left, she handed me a settlement agreement (basically a bill for being married to her !) which I paid for with the sale of the farm.

Melissa was born in Tennessee and mostly raised in Brentwood which is a suburb of Nashville. She got her first pony when she was five years old and she has had one or more horses ever since. While she was in high school, her parents bought a tract of land near College Grove and they developed it into the beautiful estate you see in all of our pictures. (We have had a very high bar set for us when it comes to being picturesque with our new farm !) Melissa graduated from the University of Memphis with a B.S. in Biology. She originally intended to go to vet school and was accepted, but by then had realized she did not want to be a vet. She worked for a vet while in college and while she remains friends to this day with her former employer she realized she was not going to be able to handle certain emotional aspects of being a vet. After graduating she married and at the same time she also started a recruiting company in Nashville. Over time, she won a sheaf of awards including being named to Nashville’s Top Thirty Under Thirty and received a lot of press for turning this small business into a successful multi-million dollar company. In a situation eerily reminiscent of mine, she and her husband ended up divorcing. Apparently neither of us take well to finding out there are more than two people in a relationship !

Q. How did you and Melissa meet ?

A: Believe it or not, we originally met on a divorce support and recovery website. At the same time, I started brokering hay from Ontario into the mid-south, primarily selling to horse people. The LAST thing on either of our minds at the time was hooking up with someone with the thoughts that it would turn into marriage, but over time that is exactly what happened. Also, the vet/friend/employer of Melissa's mentioned above happened to move to Canada and buy a vet practice near me, and she did a lot of background checking of me for Melissa as well. It was an interesting combination of people and circumstances that brought us together.

Q: And then what happened ?

A: For a whole variety of reasons, we figured it would be easier and more prudent for me to immigrate to the US than for Melissa to move to Canada. As you’ll see, I’m very glad it worked out that way. Melissa was game to try living in the north, so I came to the U.S. on a Trade NAFTA Visa (I am now a U.S. citizen) and took a job as a large herd dairy specialist at Blue Seal Feeds, Brandon VT covering parts of the Champlain Valley and portions of upstate NY. We were married at Orwell, VT in the front yard of our house under the apple trees. To say that Melissa is not built to handle the cold would be a huge understatement. After one northern winter, which I honestly felt was pretty benign, it was evident that unless I wanted to be married to a sick ice-cube, we would be relocating south ! If I didn’t know what I was in for by being married to a horse woman, I quickly learned. We spent exactly twice as much relocating Melissa’s horses to and from central Vermont to Tennessee than we did relocating ourselves !

For anyone who cared to read it that concludes our brief history of Melissa and Jason !

Lily trotting through the pasture

Alex and B-Rad

Big Boys grazing

Levendi and Ivan in the pond

Thomas, Tony and Homer

Leo and Chance
Trigger and Levendi

Thomas, Homer, Elfin, Trigger

Asterik just hanging out

Apollo and Chance

Fall Colors

I managed to find a few pictures of the fall colors to post for this blog. Middle Tennessee is not known for our spectacular fall colors, although some years are better than others. Part of the reason is that fall is a long season here, as is spring. The trees don't all turn and peak at the same time. Last year we actually had some decent fall colors but this year has been, at best, lackluster. The colors finally started to pick up some momentum in the last week but then we had some heavy rain Friday evening which washed a lot of the leaves off the trees.

We are supposed to be sunny all week this week (no rain - yay!) with daytime temperatures in the mid to upper 60's. Hopefully as the leaves finish their lazy progression through their color change we'll have another opportunity to try and enjoy some fall colors.

One of my most memorable rides was in the fall several years ago when Jason and I were living in Vermont. My (long since retired) mare Bridget and I were hacking down our road underneath a gorgeous canopy of fall colors, it felt like we were riding beneath an artist's palette of colors. It was the first week of October. The leaves were all at their peak and our road was narrow and heavily lined with trees on both sides. I was riding Bridget bareback and just soaking in the beauty that surrounded us. Bridget is one of those once in a lifetime horses that could win at the biggest shows in the hunters but was just as happy to take a quiet bareback trail ride. I literally had the reins on the buckle and it was one of those times when you truly feel like everything is perfect in the universe. Bridget seemed to be enjoying the scenery as much as I was.

Before I knew what was happening we were spinning around and Bridget was starting to bolt back down the road. I wound up mostly on her neck and managed to hang on somehow. I stopped her, rearranged myself on her back and out of the sideways, hanging off her neck position that I had wound up in. Then I turned around to see what had interrupted our peaceful, communing with nature ride. A huge moose was crossing the road!! I guess he had been in the woods and decided that Bridget and I looked non-threatening and it would be a good time to cross.

When we moved back to Tennessee Jason bought a moose crossing sign and hung it on Bridget's stall door so she could always remember her time in Vermont. The sign is still on her door and every time I see it I think of that ride.

Traveller grazing with two pear trees behind him. The pear tree on the left always changes colors and loses its leaves well ahead of the pear tree on the right.

Not much fall color in this picture! I took this picture on October 19th.

The next few pictures were all taken on November 1st. I managed to find a patch of color in the big boys' pasture.

There is some color mixed in with the green

Clay, Lucky and Chili grazing in front of some fall foliage (yes, I realize it isn't much!)

Lily looks nice in front of this tree

MyLight in front of the same tree

I took this picture of the tree in front of the old farm house on October 19th

Same tree on October 25th

And the same tree again on November 1st

Feed and Care Part I

My horse friends and acquaintances love it when I bring Jason along to any of our social gatherings or to horse shows. They love to question him endlessly about feed, hay and supplements and Jason is happy to share his knowledge. If it is the first time someone has talked to Jason about horse nutrition the first question is almost inevitably something along the lines of "what supplements does my horse need?"

At this point I usually laughingly tell them that I have been banned from reading the SmartPak catalog in our house. In fact, I get the SmartPak catalog so infrequently now that I am almost positive Jason trashes it before I even know it arrived if he was the one who happened to get the mail that day. So many supplements, so little time! Through my many years of burying my nose in horse catalogs I have learned that there is a supplement to remedy almost anything that could possibly be wrong with a horse. On top of that any conscientious and caring horse owner will be dropping the big bucks and faithfully having multiple supplements delivered on a regular basis. The marketing for these products is powerful and the customer base is an easy sell. After all we are each trying to do the very best we can for our horses so we don't take much convincing!

I just scanned the list of supplement categories for equines on the SmartPak website and there are THIRTY ONE supplement categories listed. Under selection it mentions there are over 300 individual supplements to choose from. WOW. And I can think of quite a few supplements off the top of my head that you can't even purchase through SmartPak. There truly are endless choices.

At our farm we believe the basis of any feeding programs starts with forage - grass and hay. The vast majority of a horse's calories, protein and mineral requirements should come from long stemmed forage. We actually do not bother weighing bales or flakes around here. Our approach to feeding forage is that it is in front of them 24/7/365 and they always have the option of eating forage. In the pastures we keep the hay feeders full. For the stalled horses if they in during the day they are fed hay in the morning when they are brought in. Before they have completely finished their morning hay they are given a lunch feeding of several flakes. When they are turned out for the evening their is still a bit of hay left in the stalls. If they are in overnight they are given hay when they are brought in at the end of the day. We also always do a night check on any horses in the barn overnight and they are given a generous hay portion again at night check. For about nine months out of the year our pastures have excellent grazing. Right now the horses are getting almost all of their forage from hay.

My point with all of this rambling is it is hard to know what you need to supplement without having some idea of the nutritional value of your forage. A lot of people will argue that hay tests are useless as different labs will not return identical analyses on the same samples. Our philosophy is it is better to at least know what ballpark you are playing in then to just go blind. We test our hay, our soil and our grass routinely.

Some of the values from our recent hay test (from the dry matter column) since we are not in grazing season right now:

Crude protein: 10%
DE (Mcal/lb) 0.97
ADF (acid detergent fiber): 39.6%
NDF (neutral detergent fiber): 60.5%
Calcium: .35%
Phosphorous: .26%

ADF and NDF represent how digestible the forage is, and by extrapolation, how much energy is available from within the forage. As a general rule, lower ADF and NDF numbers represent more digestible forage that contains higher levels of available energy. Whether or not the numbers presented here are acceptable for your horse situation is very subjective, but we are quite happy with these numbers for our retirees, who have free choice access to hay at all times. You don't want ADF and NDF numbers to be too low however. A good analogy for this is spring grass. Spring grass is blamed for colic, laminitis, founder, etc. The ADF and NDF numbers in spring grass are very low. Then we horse owners often add insult to injury by pouring feed into them along with the spring grass.

If a 1000 lb retiree eats 2 % of his bodyweight in hay every day, the 20 lbs of hay he consumes are supplying him/her with 2 lb crude protein....just about the right amount according to the 2007 NRC Nutrients for Horses publication. Inadequate crude protein in the diet will lead to muscle catabolization, while protein fed in excess actually requires energy to break down into urea which is then excreted in urine.

That same 1000 lb horse eating 20 lb hay every day gets roughly 19.4 Megacalories of energy supplied him. (A Megacalorie represents 1000 calories). Again, this is just about right, and we can tweak that number with grain as needed.

Jason also likes to remind people that horses don't eat percentages, they eat pounds. So we need to think not only in ratios as far as protein, balancing minerals, etc. but also in actual consumption amounts. To go back to my original rambling in this post about supplements, it is really hard to know what to supplement without having a general idea of what you might (or might not) need to supplement.

I'm going to wrap this post up now as it has gotten lengthy and turned into a bit of a lecture. In another post I'll actually talk about what supplements we do use and explain why and when we use them, and also talk about the grain we feed.

Welcome 2009!

It is hard to believe I'm writing my first post of 2009. Time really does fly when you are having fun. First I would like to thank everyone who sent me the wonderful Christmas cards with all of your lovely notes inside them. I feel terrible that I did not send out cards this year. I like to send out cards each year as a way of saying thank you for my wonderful life. Things were simply so busy around the farm in the last three months or so that I never had time to even think about Christmas cards. I feel much better now that I have gotten that off my chest!

As I reflect on 2008 there are so many wonderful memories. As with any year there are a few you would like to forget. We had to say goodbye to two residents in 2008. In the spring we had to let go of Magick, a beautiful gray arabian gelding. Magick had a nice life and lived well into his late 20's. We had to let him go when what appeared to be colic actually turned out that his intestines were being squeezed shut by a tumor that had wrapped around them. At his advanced age surgery was not a kind option for him so I held him in my arms as we let him go. Then in July we lost Mable, the sweetest, gentlest chestnut mare who had such a sad story but ended up having a wonderful last 10 years thanks to her owner/rescuer Miranda.

2008 was also full of a lot of wonderful memories. We had many new residents join us on the farm. Nothing is more fun than a new horse to play with and we had the pleasure of adding several new horses to our lives this year! Believe me I KNOW how blessed I am to combine my passion and my work and to be with the horses every day. All of you who read that sentence with envy, I'm not trying to rub it in but doing something you truly enjoy every day is a blessing. In my former life I owned a very successful corporate recruiting company. I learned for myself that money and success don't equal happiness. I'm not saying I don't miss driving my BMW some days as I am tooling around in a diesel truck but all in all I can't imagine going back to my former life.

Now that I am finished waxing philosophical I will finish up by saying that I started out 2009 in the best possible way. I RODE ONE OF MY HORSES!! I am too lazy to dig up the post where I mentioned the trailer incident I was involved in with Bonnie and Lexi over five months ago. After being out of the saddle due to the retirement of my mare for a few years nothing was more frustrating than being out of the saddle AGAIN thanks to a stupid driver. I am happy to say that as of this moment Bonnie and Lexi are both back in work. Bonnie has been back in work for a few weeks with my trainer as I've been to busy to think about riding. I've been doing some groundwork this week and very light longing with Lexi to evaluate her soundness and finally was convinced after a few days that she really was fine. I decided to get on today and she was an absolute star. I could not believe she was a 4 year old that hadn't been ridden in 5 months. I was only on her a few minutes and we walked with a couple of laps of trot around the arena but she felt fantastic and remembered what we had been working on before our unplanned vacation. For an extremely green four year old to be like that I was a very proud and happy mom if you hadn't already determined that for yourself.

I will wrap this post up with some pictures. The pictures are all from 2008 in late October. If you hang in there with me you'll probably see some pictures taken in 2009 in . . . June?? Nah, I'll throw a few 2009 pictures in for teasers before then.

Ogie, Sebastian and Faune - do you think they might have rolled in the mud? Trillion and Faune There was just a lot going on in this picture. Trillion is sticking out his tongue and Faune has his head over Sebastian

Faune and Sebastian grooming each other

Trillion and Sebastian

The goats wandering in one of the horses pastures

Trillion, Sebastian and Ogie

Some of the chicks I rescued (part I and part II) and their ungrateful mother

Leo, Homer and Apollo

Chance

Apollo, Ivan and Elfin

Asterik

Trillion and Asterik taking a drink while Poco watches from the other side of the fence

Sparky

Teddy, Buffy and Harmony

Spread out and peacefully grazing

Chance and Homer

Buffy

Teddy and Harmony

Horsey Christmas

Like any good horse person I have lots of horse-themed holiday decorations. Most of them have been found by my mom who is amazing at finding great stuff to decorate with. I rarely get past the tack store and the feed store so I'm not the best at decorating. Following are a few of my horse ornaments courtesy of my mom. To everyone Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Feliz Navidad, Happy Holidays etc.!

Huntsman Santa with his hound

My mare Bridget with her foal Lexi (Lexi is now 4). My mom painted their faces and socks so they would be correct - 4 socks on Bridget and 3 socks on Lexi. My mom is awesome, and she probably just wants my tree to look half decent!! She gave me this for Lexi's first Christmas.

The horses need carrots of course!

Horse ornament

Horse trailer complete with horse inside which unfortunately doesn't show up in the picture. Did I mention my mom is the best?

She even made a brush jump for my tree

Christmas saddle

Hunting horn

Grooming box - my mom just continues to outdo herself every year