Equine Husbandry

Let's first establish that Jessie feels that the term should be "Equine Wifery" seeing how she's a wife and not a husband.

Jessie and Evie, a fellow horse lover and ranch hand, begin working with the babies shortly after their births. The goal is to create opportunities for the foal to become familiar with people and to develop a healthy respect for them. When the foal shows a willingness to accept new things, we begin haltering and leading them. After the foal is familiar with and respectful of humans and tolerates being handled, we turn them out with the rest of the herd where we allow them to grow up and be horses. Occasionally, we go out with halters for short refresher courses in handling and trimming, but mostly we leave them alone.

At two years of age, or whenever the horse demonstrates the physical and mental readiness to begin training, Jessie starts them in the round pen. They begin with voice commands and learning to stop when asked. Jessie also saddles and bridles them when they demonstrate the willingness to accept it. Once the horse is moving though three gaits on voice and line signals and easily accepts bit and saddle, she begins ground driving the horse.

Ground driving will continue as long as necessary. Jessie usually moves out of the round pen as soon as possible to avoid boredom on the horse's part and to expose them to as many new things as possible. Jessie will also begin putting weight in the saddle during the ground driving process. The goal is to have the horse accept their first rider without fear and without bucking.

Once Jessie has put the first few rides on the horse, assuming the horse calmly accepted the rider, she will pass the started horse onto a local cowboy trainer who uses the horse for everyday cowboying tasks. The horse learns to move cattle and basic cutting and roping skills.

Breeding
Usually we pasture breed our mares beginning in April. We'll let the stud cover the mares for 60 days to ensure that he's settled all of them. In 2004, we fall bred three mares mostly as an experiment to see how fall breeding would work in our program.

Feeding
Our goal in feeding the horses is similar to that of feeding our cattle. We want to give the mares and foals every advantage without spending too many resources on outside feed. We are fortunate in that the local Co-op mixes a sweet feed that is exceptional for horses and is very reasonably priced. This is what we feed our mares heavy in foal, as well as lactating mares and weanlings. To help stretch this feed and increase its fiber, we will mix it with ground milo. We also feed ground milo to our young horses in training and our working horses. It's a source of feed that we can obtain easily and cheaply, and it increases the fiber and to a small degree the protein content of their diet.

As far as roughage, our horses do very well on our native small bluestem. When necessary, we feed some alfalfa but only rarely.

More Quarter Horse Links:  Stallion   |   Broodmares   |   2 & 3 Year Olds   |   Yearlings   |   Current Foal Crop

Contact  |  Jessie Cummings  |  1271 Rock, Howard, Kansas 67349  |  620-864-2298