PrintFinding buyers for the products of their breeding program is one of the biggest challenges breeders face.
You’ve stayed up all night on foal watch, invested thousands of dollars, and now you have the end results—fuzzy foals—running around in your pastures. But what do you do now?
The market for young, unbroken horses in the United States is notoriously difficult. The vast scope of our country’s geography makes the elite auction system that’s so successful in Europe unrealistic here.
And U.S. buyers historically want horses that are ready to show. What’s a breeder to do?
The answer is to market effectively.
Here, breeding professionals such as general manager and breeding manager Natalie DeBerardinis of Hilltop Farm (Md.), Matt Davis of Crooked Willow Farms (Colo.) and noted hunter breeder Tish Quirk share their strategies for bridging the gap between breeder and buyer.
All three agree that it’s tough—but not impossible—to sell unbroken youngsters.
“Everyone has to decide their own marketing approach. Foals and anything that’s under saddle are pretty easy to sell. The gray area is the yearlings and 2-year-olds. If I haven’t sold them as foals, I figure I’ve pretty much made a commitment to keeping them at least until they’re 2 1/2 or 3 years old, at which point we evaluate their free jump and decide which ones we’re putting under saddle and which ones we send to other trainers,” Davis said.
Quirk has resigned herself to the realities of the market.
“In this country, most of the buyers want a horse who can go on and do a job,” she said. “So, if they’re buying show horses, they want to be able to show them. For me, it’s been best to keep them long enough that I can get them going and started in an ongoing program that develops the horses into what the trainers are looking for. Obviously, that takes a lot more time and money. And lots of breeders aren’t comfortable with that.”
But all three have some practical advice and knowledge on the subject of promoting young stock to potential buyers.
Price Realistically
It’s hard, when you’ve invested hours of effort, sleepless nights of foal watch and countless dollars into your foals, to put a monetary figure on their worth. But top breeders emphasize that you have to separate your emotional investment with the foal from financial reality.
“I think this is where small breeders struggle a little bit,” said DeBerardinis. “When you go to price a horse, there are three things people consider—what you have invested into it, there’s what you think it’s worth, and what it’s actually going to sell for.
“Those can be three very different figures. With our own young horses, when we make a decision to sell one, we’re going to price pretty aggressively,” DeBerardinis continued. “We’re not going to factor in how much we have invested in the horse or what I think it might have sold for last year. If that horse needs to be sold, we’re going to price it so that it’s going to sell. I think a lot of small breeders struggle with the concept of, ‘Oh, I have X amount of dollars invested in this horse, I have to get X dollars back.’ And the reality is that you’re not, sometimes.”
DeBerardinis added that if a horse needs to be sold, the breeder needs to determine what it can realistically sell for. Pricing this way is a much better strategy in many ways.
