With a disturbing host of challenges facing standardbred breeders and the future of their agricultural lands in Nova Scotia, one more issue seems to be bubbling to the surface.
Discussions at recent provincial Agricultural Land Review Committee meetings suggest that the public perception of racehorse breeding as a legitimate farming activity is lagging behind in the most populous Maritime province.
Story by Melissa Keith
Photos by Kyle Burton
Long a mainstay of the Nova Scotian agricultural landscape, standardbred breeding has taken a numerical nosedive from its glory days. The Atlantic Sires Stakes 2010 stallion roster lists a mere eight horses commercially at stud in the province, in marked contrast to Prince Edward Island’s 22 stallions.
Admittedly, standardbred breeders, like farmers of all stripes in the Maritimes, have endured a plague of less than helpful events over the past few decades: lower prices and sometimes lower demand for their products, a glut of imported competition, increased costs of doing business, and pressure to turn farmland into industrial, retail, or residential-use property. Regional racehorse nurseries have additional concerns which amplify the pressure to sell farms to developers, like urban sprawl eating up training facilities, limited or non-existent local racing opportunities, yearling buyers who prefer to take their dollars farther afield, and elected officials who consider anything racehorse-related to be ‘gaming’ and not agriculture, are the tip of the proverbial iceberg.
Nova Scotia’s Department of Agriculture recently saw a need to obtain public feedback on the disheartening general trend toward farm closures, and commissioned a province-wide series of public meetings which ran from January until April of this year. “What do you think the future of Nova Scotia’s agricultural lands should be?” prodded the marketing campaign, which was launched by a newly-minted Agricultural Land Review Committee. That committee was comprised of chicken, vegetable, dairy, beef and mixed-production farmers, some also advocates for local community-supported agriculture (CSA) and farmers’ market initiatives.
You may notice there’s no equine representation named in that list. But given the challenges encountered by provincial horse breeders, why not?
Committee Chair and former beef cattle farmer Rick Williams explains it wasn’t a deliberate exclusion, but “the idea was basically to try to capture most of the major agricultural regions and touch most of the major bases, with a limited budget.” The public sessions themselves failed to draw much of a racing or other equestrian contingent — which Williams admits was disappointing, because raising horses is still “a land-based activity that generates money for the economy.”
He notes that there’s some trepidation among other types of farmers about including horse breeders in the accepted definition of the term ‘farmer.’ Not a horseman himself, the Committee Chair describes a dividing line in the agricultural community -- between horses for personal use and horses for use in the economic arena -- with average farmers viewing horse hobby farms as more recreational than agricultural.
Statistics Canada’s 2006 Census of Agriculture certainly includes horses bred for the sales ring or private sale in its definition of agricultural products, yet there seems to be a persistent stereotype which suggests that raising horses isn’t real agriculture.
While standardbred farms garner agri-credibility in P.E.I. (witness Meridian Farms featured alongside food and textile crop producers at 2008’s Island-wide Open Farm Day) the recent Agricultural Land Review Committee meetings suggest public perception of racehorse breeding as legitimate farming activity is lagging behind in Nova Scotia -- the most populous Maritime province. It’s unfortunate, since Williams argues that even standardbred hobby farms have economic importance; they purchase farm supplies and keep cleared land productive. He offers that, with a little luck, some may even join the commercial realm.
That direction of evolution — from equine hobby farmer to commercial horse breeder — is actually an improbability in twenty-first century Nova Scotia. With no major racing venue having filled the void created by Sackville Downs’ closure in the 1980’s, the majority of commercial standardbred farms have either downsized to hobby level or disappeared altogether. On those which have physically survived from the heady days of proportionally-higher yearling prices, stud fees and purses now exist in radically altered form.
Take Kilkerran Acres, for example, the Tatamagouche-area facility long owned and operated by the late Doug Ferguson. Kilkerran-prefix horses were dominant performers around the Maritimes for many years, with two of the best being Kilkerran Fury, a two-time Atlantic Horse of the Year, and Kilkerran Ingle, the first Maritime-bred to register a 1:55 mile on a local oval and the last Maritime-bred to capture the Gold Cup and Saucer. Ingle’s career milestones bookend an era in Nova Scotian harness racing: his accomplishments came at a time when the industry itself was fading economically, not unlike most other agricultural sectors in the province.
Rick Williams says beef producers are being pushed to the edge by low income and high expenses, and the local pork industry has already met its demise. But at the former Kilkerran Acres, a familiar 21-year-old stallion still oversees a property which has diversified while keeping the standardbred at its heart. From his newly-built paddock, Kilkerran Ingle can watch Shelley Ferguson, the late Doug’s daughter-in-law, riding her pacing-bred mare alongside free-running Golden Retrievers. And they aren’t just any Golden Retrievers, but some of the finest prize-winning purebreds in Canada. To emphasize the origins of her champion dogs, Shelley Whidden and husband Andrew Ferguson carry on Doug Ferguson’s legacy by starting every dog’s name with Kilkerran. The prized puppies are spoken for — and paid for — before they are even born; Shelley gets to be selective about their future homes. The Kilkerran Retrievers thus contribute to keeping the Ferguson family’s two farm properties economically viable and agriculturally active when hundreds of other rural Nova Scotians have sold their family farms and moved to urban centres.
Shelley and Andrew’s farm is actually next door to the original Kilkerran Acres, where Donna Ferguson lives with Kilkerran Ingle and an ever-diminishing broodmare band. Down to around ten mares (from a high of more than 40 when Kilkerran Acres was sending yearlings to sale every fall), the broodmares who remain are well-loved pets of Doug Ferguson’s widow Donna, and are no longer considered breeding stock. According to Shelley, “Donna placed most of the herd in good homes,” when Kilkerran Acres ceased commercial standardbred breeding after Doug’s passing last spring. Despite their mutual love of standardbreds, one thing was clear: Shelley and Andrew were not going to continue raising racing stock themselves, although Shelley admits to having a wild dream of acquiring an Arabian stallion to cross-breed with standardbred mares to produce endurance riding horses. The experienced trail rider also has a more conservative back-up plan. “Hopefully down the road, because we have the land, I would like to take some standardbred rescues and retrain them for saddle,” muses Shelley, who notes that she, her sister and some friends all ride ex-racehorses from Truro Raceway because of their excellent qualities as trail horses.
Given that horse rescue has a hefty price-tag without third-party support, Shelley hasn’t pursued it full-time. Instead, she works as a veterinary technician in Truro, sells her prize-winning dogs and Siamese cats, and, with her husband, raises profitable hay on their land. Andrew has, she adds, ventured into growing garlic and rearing lamb for meat, when he’s not away from home in his employment as a camp supervisor at a Mongolian ore exploration site. The Fergusons are a fairly representative example of a younger farm couple: they work the land to raise crops and animals, yet depend on jobs outside the agricultural setting to help pay the bills. It’s their passion for the rural lifestyle which keeps them in the game, even though the harness racing connection grows increasingly tenuous. “It was kind of like the end of an era when Doug died,” reflects Shelley. “Andrew knew that racing was going to be getting lower and lower [economically].” Against the odds, Doug Ferguson’s beloved farm and the Kilkerran name live on, with a new focus but still producing champions: Shelley reports that Kilkerran’s Wee Connor Boy was ranked 2009’s second-best Golden Retriever in all of Canada.
As Kilkerran Acres diversifies as a farm, another Northern Mainland Nova Scotia breeding operation has intensified its concentration on standardbreds. Pacers bearing the prefix Pictonian have been making their mark in Canada ever since Tony Zuethoff turned a dairy cow operation into the province’s major racehorse producer in 2002. Like the old Kilkerran Acres, Pictonian Farm stands two stallions and has a sizable group of resident broodmares — 17 at the moment, down from 22 last year. Zuethoff observes that it’s challenging to make a go of horse breeding, in spite of having the room for turnouts and boarding to supplement his equine income. A lifelong horseman who grew up in Holland, he considered his options when he wanted to raise horses commercially in Nova Scotia. “I thought there was more opportunity [in standardbreds] at that time [than in three day eventing and dressage horses], and I kind of liked it too. I was going to do both at first, but then some of my friends were into standardbreds, so I started looking into it, especially the breeding end of it, the pedigrees and so on, and I was really intrigued by it.”
Despite turning his intrigue with harness horses into reality, Zuethoff confesses he had no particular interest in the recent public meetings about the future of Nova Scotian agricultural lands. While he says he was aware of the consultations conducted by Williams’ committee, he didn’t take part — a decision which might seem strange for a commercial livestock breeder. But Zuethoff blames a pervasive nostalgia among hobbyists for turning him off. “I know they want to preserve farmland and they want to preserve a certain way of living,” he explains, “but I think they sometimes kind of forget the economics of it.”
The owner of Pictonian Farms decries how typical participants in public consultations only view farming as “a nice way to raise their family,” rather than real work. “The day that the kids are gone, the farm is gone too. I have problems with that, and those [farm owners] are the ones you see at the meetings too.” Pausing, he tempers his criticism of these non-committal farm operators. “They mean well,” he offers, “but they never really wanted to make a living out of it.” (Statistics Canada backs up his appraisal: in 2006, 48.5% of Nova Scotia’s farmers relied on income from non-agricultural employment.)
What might have lured the master of Pictonian Farm to the agricultural lands meetings? According to Zuethoff, the sessions would have benefited from retired farmers (or people who work hard and grew up doing it) being more involved. “They have sons or daughters who are still into farming, and they are good leaders in the community,” he says, distinguishing such landowners from individuals who regard farming as an optional lifestyle. “I see nothing wrong with [hobby farming], if they choose to do that, but they never really had to make a living out of the farming. It was a sideline, or the wife was a teacher, and it’s just a way to bring up their kids I guess. They don’t have much of an economic impact on the industry overall, because they never choose to, usually.”
Zuethoff says people who are truly invested in agriculture — in every sense of the word — simply make better industry representatives than those who can and do walk away from their farmland when the going gets tough. He would have liked to see horsepeople involved in the Committee meetings, but with regional yearling prices unable to match the rising costs of farm operation, many established horse breeders have opted to scale back or get out of the business.
Voices like Zuethoff’s — the voice of the serious commercial breeder — are becoming a rarity not only in Nova Scotia, but across North America, as even giants like Armstrong Brothers and Yankeeland Farm disappear. Geography is one factor working to Pictonian Farm’s advantage: Zuethoff points out the case of a now-defunct Ontario breeder (Glengate Farms) who had to get $18,000 per yearling to break even, while his own facility does not face such extreme financial pressure. “We can raise a yearling probably 10 to 15 thousand dollars cheaper than the big breeding farms do in Ontario,” he grins. “We work for nothing and all that stuff!”
But he also speaks of numerous worries about the long-range future of his farm, spanning from if and when to sell off land in order to support the farm itself, to the uncertain prospect of a Sackville Downs-caliber racing plant ever coming back to the province. “I’m kind of interested to see how the breeding goes this year, with the economy,” admits Zuethoff. “It’s very hard to make a dollar here.”
The actions of Shelley Ferguson and Tony Zuethoff say as much as their words about their feelings on the loss of agricultural lands in Nova Scotia. Neither attended the public forums on the issue, yet both maintain productive farms that run counter to dire forecasts of condominiums springing up on irreplaceable topsoil. They have (thus far) fended off the three main threats to arable land identified by Rick Williams’ group: development, abandonment and soil depletion.
They are more immediately concerned with profitability of their land than with the other theme receiving unanimous assent at the Committee sessions, which was conservation of farmland. Williams provides ample sobering evidence that agricultural properties need protection; Nova Scotia’s decline from a half-million hectares of land in active production in 1901 to only 180 thousand hectares as of 2006, he says, practically screams for intervention. “We’ve doubled our population but reduced our active farmland by two-thirds,” he warns, “And you can zone for farming all you like but that doesn’t keep the trees from coming up when profits go down and farmers move on.”
The Agricultural Land Review Committee has wrapped up its public consultations, compiled its report, and submitted the findings to the province. Now it’s up to Darrell Dexter’s NDP majority government to “take it under advisement and maybe move forward with it,” says Williams. Some policy changes conducive to farmland conservation would no doubt be welcomed by local breeders too. “Horse farmers are not recognized as farmers,” laments Zuethoff as he recounts being ineligible for insurance and environmental testing grant money because of raising racehorses instead of other livestock, plus being subject to HST on feed destined for horses and not cattle. Tax incentives for the breeding industry would help, but Pictonian Farm’s tenacious proprietor firmly believes that a new track in the Halifax Regional Municipality would be the best economic driver for racing-related agriculture and land. The rest, as they say, will take care of itself. “Basically, I don’t think the government should be involved in it [i.e. by legislating farmers to keep farmland cleared/productive]. The farmers are farmers in their heart, they will preserve the land. I think there will always be farmland here.”
Tradition runs strong in Nova Scotia racing families. With a little (economic) encouragement, could this force be harnessed as a powerful force for protection of agricultural land? “There will always be standardbreds here,” says Shelley Ferguson of the Kilkerran lands. Living testimony exists in the form of two yearlings owned by Barry Ferguson, her brother-in-law. The young horses await training in the farm’s big pasture, and are, like Shelley’s son Delaney, part of the next generation. Threatened farmland? Yes and no. Industry highs and lows affect profitability, but contemporary agricultural survival is about more than dollars alone. In Shelley’s words, “It’s a testament to the Fergusons. This is their land, they love it, and they will always have standardbreds. That’s just the way it is.”