The State of the Union: The story of the current status of the horse industry

Julie Broadway, president of the American Horse Council breaks down the numbers on the recent economic impact study of the horse industry. Employment opportunities are up, people who love horses are everywhere and the future looks bright.

For more information
Julie Broadway - jbroadway@horsecouncil.org

Economic impact study

Kris Hiney: Welcome to extension horses. Tack, box talk series, horse stories with a purpose. I'm your host, Dr. Kris Hiney, with Oklahoma State University, and today I'm delighted to be able to help bring you the State of the Union address by the president of the American Horse Council, Julie Broadway. So welcome Julie to the program.

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: Thanks, Kris, for having me. I'm looking forward to having your listeners understand a little bit more about what the American Horse Council does, and especially about our recent national economic impact study.

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Kris Hiney: Yeah. So this is numbers that come out, is it every? The last one was 2017, right? So about every 7 years that you guys actually produce these numbers for us, and we're always in academia, eagerly awaiting the numbers.

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: Yeah, we shoot to do it every 5 years. But the pandemic kind of set us back a little bit on this one. So we had to post phone just ever so slightly. But I can tell you that people are already asking me, okay, so you're gonna do this 5 years from now again, and I'm like I just birthed this baby. Let me get over the labor pains before I start talking about the next one.

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Kris Hiney: Yeah, this is a pretty big undertaking, isn't it?

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: It takes forever to plan it, and then to execute it. So it it is. It's definitely, I say, a labor of love, because in this particular case it took us with the pandemic. It took us 2 years to get it all organized, and then a year to execute it, and then this is the year we finally get to do the big Reveal. I feel like I should be on Hgtv. And

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: show the final products. Kind of thing.

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Kris Hiney: Maybe the before and after. So maybe we should let listeners know a little bit about what information is included in this, and how you guys even got it. Did you like go drive around and count like there's a horse. Here's another horse. There's 2 over there.

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: Let me begin by telling your listeners just so. They have some context. The American Horse Council is the only National Association exclusively representing all segments of the horse industry in Washington, DC. We don't matter what breed, what discipline, what occupation? If you're involved in the equestrian community or in the equine industry. We're your voice in Washington.

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: and we really rely on the data that comes from this study to help us be persuasive when we're working on legislative and regulatory issues, and I'll circle back to that in a few minutes.

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: But we also have a foundation, and our foundation is its mission is to do charitable scientific, educational, and research that benefits the industry. So the foundation is really the organization that conducts the national economic impact study. We use that as our means to get all this thing done.

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: But again, to your earlier question, this is not a census. We don't route around and count courses. We conduct this through a series of surveys

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: for the 2023 study. We did 20 different surveys. There were 2 main surveys, one that went to horse owners.

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: and one that went to suppliers in the industry. But we picked out a lot of smaller segments of the space that we thought really had very specific data requests that we needed to follow through on. For example, you wouldn't want a horse or an equine rescue to put out the same survey that say, John Smith, horse owner.

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: did so. We had a special survey for them. We had a special survey for equine assisted services facilities. We had a special survey just for academia. So all the universities that have any kind of equine programs got a special survey. So we did a lot of unique things. So about 20 surveys to do it, we usually let the surveys run somewhere in the neighborhood of

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: 3 to 6 months, because at any point in time. Somebody's busy doing a horse show somewhere, and they don't have time to fill out the survey. So we started. We let it run a little while and we usually are hoping to get a really strong response

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: somewhere. Above 25,000 or more survey respondents. And so we got that this time we were pretty pleased with that, although I always want more, more and more, more and more is better.

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Kris Hiney: So do you find like? Are there different cause? I don't think I got a survey, and nobody invited me to the party. Do different segments of the industry respond at a higher rate than others. So does that.

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: Oh!

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Kris Hiney: Thanks, so much.

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: So most, most definitely, we get our strongest response from just John Smith, horse owner out there. Those surveys go out through all the breed and discipline associations. They're all on social media. We circulate them through American horse publications and all kinds of equine periodicals. But a good example is, we have a very specific survey that goes to race tracks

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: that one's usually harder to get, which means we have to do a lot more secondary research to try to get all our numbers, our facts and figures together. But we had a good solid response from Academia, a really good response from

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: equine assisted service facilities. I'm trying to think through right now. Not quite as strong response as I would have liked from the veterinary community. But again, this is an in depth survey, and I'm certainly sympathetic as a horse owner myself to

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: how much time and energy it takes to complete the survey, and I jokingly tell people I don't want to know what I spent last year on my horse. I'm really in denial. I don't wanna add it all up, and the survey ask you to answer all those questions. How did you much did you spend on board? How much did you spend on fee blah blah blah blah. And so I get when people start the survey and then they bail on us. So that's one of the biggest challenges, you know, as a researcher.

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Kris Hiney: I do.

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: You know, create a survey that gives you what you need, but you don't end up with survey, fatigue.

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Kris Hiney: Battling with that right now.

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: So complicated.

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Kris Hiney: Yeah. So you get this sent out to lots of different people. And like, you're not doing direct contact with them right? So this is just kind of people that see the survey and are like, Oh, I think I should help out my horse industry.

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: Yes, and we offered this time around for the first time we offered prize incentives, so if they got all the way through the survey, and they threw their name in. They were eligible to win a bunch of really nice things like a whole year of feed from Purina, and you know, a John Deer, Gator, and all kinds of things to try to encourage people to do the survey. But no, we don't have direct contact, and let me alleviate any

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: anxiety anybody has. They're totally confidential. I never see the results. We hire a firm that specializes in economic impact studies. To do this. I always tell people when I present the numbers. I'm not a mathematician. I'm not a statistician. I'm not an economist. I'm just here to tell you what they came back and told us. From what they got out of the survey data.

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Kris Hiney: Very good, alright. So we sent it out. 20 surveys went to all kinds of people hopefully. They answered and won a tractor. So now we wanna know what are the numbers. And I guess you know what I always think, because numbers are sort of abstract

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Kris Hiney: to put them in context of.

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Kris Hiney: Where were we? Where are we going? Shrinking, declining growth, like all that fun stuff.

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: Okay, so I've got great news most of our numbers were up from the 2017 study. But let me start with what I call the big picture. This is the number that I love when I'm talking to groups. So one of the things we learned in 2,017, and we heard again in 2023, was that in total 30.4 8% of all US. Households which converts to 39 million households contain a horse enthusiast.

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Kris Hiney: What is a horse enthusiast?

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: Great question. So horse enthusiast can be someone who owns a horse.

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: someone who participates but doesn't own a horse or someone who spectates but doesn't own or participate.

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: But we think that's a fantastic number, because we often are asked. You know, what's the relevance of our industry these days, you know, a lot of people don't grow up in an agricultural climate anymore. They're not exposed to horses. So the fact that we have 39 million households that still contain a horse enthusiast is a really great indicator that we've got a strong.

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: a strong message to say there, and I feel good about our social license to operate. That means we've still got a lot of people out there that are like with us.

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Kris Hiney: We can do a whole podcast on that, too, if we want so so that I I have to ask. So again, and sometimes I'm always a cynic, so you might have to be like, well, this is what we learned. So you said there were like a portion of those were spectators. Yet when I go to horse shows and events we don't like I in Europe like they are spectator events, people legit come to horse shows to watch them. We don't really have

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Kris Hiney: same thing here in the Us. So a lot of the spectators are just the same people that are showing, so are they spectating in a way that I'm unfamiliar with.

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: No, but what we have learned, and I don't have a long details about this, but so many of our venues these days have gone to live streaming, that we do think we are reaching audiences, but in a very different way. I'm jokingly also say that I think we have been benefiting from the Yellowstone effect. When people tell us that they are horse enthusiast, that often means that they got exposed to horses because they watched

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: Amy or they watched a Yellowstone, or they watched one of the TV shows. That's featuring horses in some way. So there, there's a little bit of an interpretation on the word spectate. I think.

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Kris Hiney: Gotcha gotcha. Okay? So and we definitely have had more interest in kinda Western heritage because of those television shows. And just so, you know, if they put alfalfa, hey? In a field, it's not gonna grow back. I always like that was wrong. But those little moments where you're like, oh, sorry.

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: Oh!

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Kris Hiney: Alright. So I I digress. So we at least have a lot of people that are interested in horses and like them. We've known that, like horses definitely draw people in. There's something just so different to me about a horse versus other livestock species that the general public is, is certainly more attracted to. So that's good.

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: Yeah. So let me give you some of the other stats that we were really pleased with. So in 2017, what we found was that annually the equine industry contributed $122 billion with me to the Us. Economy in 2023 that number went up to $177 billion.

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: Anybody ask. There's probably a little bit of inflation in there. We know that. But still we think that that's a really good number. To jump up 55 billion

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: in about 5 or 6 years is a really good trend.

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: It's not surprising that we saw salaries, wages, benefits. Total compensation go from $79 billion in 2017 to $122 billion. That's

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: good for our industry, because it sounds like people are making a livable wage in some areas of the country looks pretty firm.

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: And we also so jobs jump up from 1.7 4 million to 2.2 million jobs in our industry. So all really great indicators. That this, that the industry is strong and thriving, and we feel really good about that. We were nervous, Kris, when we went into the pandemic because we saw the industry contract during the last big recession

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: we were like, Oh, how is this gonna affect us? But, in fact, what we found was, there was a little bit of a silver lining for our industry, because

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: riding horses is inherently social. Distancing people move from urban areas to rural areas. They had more free time, more flexibility, kids for home schooling. So they had the option. And so we saw waiting lists during the pandemic for kids to want to get out and take riding lessons and all kinds of things were happening that we just totally did not anticipate

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: when the when the pandemic hit.

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Kris Hiney: Yeah. And horse prices went like through the roof.

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: Through the roof. Yeah, and I'm still under the roof.

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: speaking as somebody who is like would like to buy a horse, but hadn't go finding one to afford

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Kris Hiney: That was an unexpected phenomena during that period. So definitely. And I'm assuming that that effect was felt in the data from the survey, just the purchase prices, of horses, is being quite robust.

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: Yeah, the one number that did go down slightly. This is not gonna shock any of your listeners. We went from 7.2 million horse population in 2017 to 6.6 5 million horses. And we knew, looking at breeding registrations and overall trends, that we were gonna see a little decline, but the population is still pretty strong, so we were overall pretty pleased with the high level numbers.

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Kris Hiney: Yeah. And I would assume, I you know, that's this is economics, 101, right? So supply and demand if the prices of horses stay high, that the supply is going to go back up to meet the demand. I would guess.

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: Exactly how it works. Now, the other thing your listeners should know. If they want to go to our website, you can see the high level numbers. We have a Pdf that people can download and take a look at the high level numbers. But we divide the industry into 4 sectors. We have recreation.

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: We have competition, and competition can be any kind of competition. It could be polo. It could be pro rodeo. It could be show jumping. It doesn't matter what is competition. Then we have racing, which is all breeds that do racing.

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: And then the last one that people usually ask me about is what it's called our working horse category. Those are horses that are used by mounted police or on dude ranches or in equine assisted services facilities. Those are. Those are horses that have like a a full time job, if you will, that they're performing. That's our smallest sector. Not surprising. But I would say that the

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: competition sector is really probably one of our top sectors between competition and racing. Recreation is by far

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: as numbers go, not by economic input, but by sheer force population, largest sector by population. So there's some great data that you can see about each of the sectors. It will tell. The report will tell you what their direct value to the economy is, what the added value to the economy is, and how many jobs there are in each of those sectors. If anybody's interested in all that details.

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Kris Hiney: So how do you? So? Just thinking about recreation horses and competition horses? Where's the line of when he's a recreation horse? And when, like I show him once, is he now competition, horse? Or is there like a threshold that like, now you're this thing, and not for fun, because technically, all competition is for recreation.

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: The way the survey works is a little bit in the the respondent they get to choose and designate. What sector they think their horse falls in. So it really does vary. I mean, there are certainly people who are clearly just trail riders, and they go into the recreation sector. But there are, without a doubt, Kris, people who cross pollinate across all the groups and sort of have to choose one.

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Kris Hiney: So it's just with the group that they self identify with the most.

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: That's also true with breeds. And this is a chart I love to talk about. So everybody always asked me, okay, break down that horse population, so not surprising the largest population by breed is, quarter horses. They're about 2 million of them or next, Thoroughbreds about a million of them. Then you have paints.

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: Then you have standard breds new in the top. 5. This time around from 2,017 are mules and donkeys. They moved up to scale this time. And people have asked me, why do you think that is? And I said, I don't know. Mules and donkeys have gotten more popular I feel more it shows than I used to. I don't know but that's what it was.

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: You see, Arabs next warm bloods. And then Mini's jumped up the list this time, too. So we've got a breakdown by breed, and those are sort of the top ones that we have right there, and I want to clarify again. This is in the I'm the respondent, so we don't say is we're not coming down on John Smith, who says, well, it looks like a quarter horse to me. So I'm gonna say, quater horse. It could be whatever John wants to check off.

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Kris Hiney: Yeah, cause I think I saw those. And that was a question, maybe, that I had the thoroughbred numbers like we get the Jockey Club reports about how many horses are registered, and we're like those are a little

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Kris Hiney: oh, like, so is that like people are reporting them, or maybe they're not Jockey Club registered, or that number to surprise me a little bit of just the population of horses I see out and about.

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: Yeah. So the Jockey Club and I had a long conversation about this, because the Jockey Club says only horses that are registered with them are capital T thoroughbreds, but there were plenty of respondents this time who felt like their horse, was a small T thorough bred. They might not have been registered with the Jockey Club. But that's where those differences come in.

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Kris Hiney: Gotcha gotcha. That's like the same argument when people are like. You know, is it a paint horse with the capital P. Or is it a horse with spots makes a difference to certainly makes a difference to Apj. So.

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: It to happen.

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: Another stat that I love to share is the breakdown by State not surprising. Texas, California, and Florida are the top 3 States. They were the top 3 States last time. They'll probably be the top 3 States next time we do this thing, but then, after that it sort of jumps around. What we have this time around was those 3 were followed by Oklahoma, Kentucky, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York. And so that's a pretty good roundup of states there. And.

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Kris Hiney: You're saying we're back to Number 4. Last time we were Number 5.

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: You are.

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Kris Hiney: Hey? Good, job! Oklahoma.

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: Yeah, that's right. So we were pretty pleased overall with sort of how that shook out now. So your listeners know when we do an economic impact study, we fund raise to do this thing. It takes a lot of money to do one of these studies. So we fundraise to do the national. And then, if there are states that want a very specific State study, they have to commission that themselves.

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: So this time around, we had 6 States that commission studies and those were Texas, California, Florida, Maryland, New York, and North Carolina.

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: Also. This time we did what are called community studies for the first time, and the 3 community studies this time were

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: Marion County, Florida, not surprising.

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Kris Hiney: It's Ocala right.

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: Long Island, New York, wanted to get their own study this time. And a little place called Jacks Borough, Texas. I had to look up where Jack's borough was. But Jack's borough is on the outskirts of Austin, I think somewhere.

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Kris Hiney: Really.

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: And they are at a major intersection of a couple of interstates. And so they are looking to build a new horse venue. There.

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Kris Hiney: Oh, okay, I was like, yeah, because it's Pilot Point, Aubrey Denton like, that's where the horses are. So what are you doing there.

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: See if they could build up their economic impact case to maybe justify that.

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Kris Hiney: Gotcha gotcha great.

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: So if you're interested in in one of those specific studies, listeners can reach out to me, and I can tell you who in the State to contact. So, for example, Dr. Chelsea, Huseman at Texas A&M, did all fundraising for the Texas study. So she's got the keys to the car for the Texas study. If anybody wants to populate.

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Kris Hiney: I could get that.

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: I'm gonna share real quickly a couple of other stats, cause I think they're fun. We also did another deep dive on land preservation. So you know, a lot of family farms are shrinking less green space, those kinds of things. So we really wanted to see how much horse acreage there was across the country, and the numbers came in at 12.5 million acres are dedicated to horses.

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: And we were pretty happy with that number. And what we also learned was that 62%, owners own or lease property. So the other percentages are pro. Probably people who are boarding their horses, or something like that. But that that's a good number for us, especially when we were talking about green footprint and environmental sustainability, and all the things that we, as an industry, contribute to make the world a greener, happier place.

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Kris Hiney: So is the acreage going up or down, then over time. I assume it's shrinking. But I could be wrong.

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: Yup, it is shrinking. And, interestingly enough, the Us. Department of Agriculture. Just put out. It's National Agricultural Statistic Service. Just put out some new numbers and small family farms really took a huge decline of this time around. Our number didn't fall as much as their did theirs did because they were looking across all ag commodities. But still it's a decline.

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Kris Hiney: Well, you can drive around the countryside and see why.

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: That used to be green now look like little boxes of development, you know.

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Kris Hiney: Yup, absolutely. I see it all the time.

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: Another statistic your listeners might be, interested in, which I think is low personally. We wanted to know how many people volunteer time in the space. So we had 2 million industry related volunteers.

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: I got some great statistics like from back country horseman of America. That that's the organization across the country that does all our trail maintenance and works on helping ensure that we can get out and ride horses on trails, and they keep account of how many volunteer hours they spend in a year, and they're about 207,000 h in a year. So some good data there.

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: But when we ask competition organizers how many volunteers they had? What we got back was a number of like 5,800 volunteers, and I think that's extremely low.

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: Because I've run a horse show for a couple of years, and I know how many volunteers it takes to do one horse show, much less thousands of them across the country. So I'm like, I don't know about that number so much.

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Kris Hiney: But I wonder if, like people don't. They don't think like if they're an official volunteer like I've signed up and done the paperwork to to volunteer at Turning point versus like Oh, I helped out and swung the gate and get did ribbons and help them run that like you? You may not think of yourself as perhaps as

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Kris Hiney: high level volunteer, but you still are.

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: Still are still are so. Anyway, that's a good statistic for us, because we are always interested in how much we can contribute. You know how we get all contribute back to the industry that we love. So we like that number to a lot.

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: Another stat that we did this time for the first time, was as I said, through rescues and sanctuaries. What we really wanted to understand was how many horses are in rescues and sanctuaries across the country, and how much capacity is there?

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: So what we found was, they're a little over a thousand 501 C. 3 rescues and sanctuaries across the country based upon the responses we got back. We know that they are full up to about 73 75. That's about what their total

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: take intake years right now. So that leaves us a little bit. So we've got, maybe that 25% left. The challenge is that the average length of stay for a horse in a rescue is a little over 300 days.

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: and most of society thinks about length of stay in terms of cats and dogs and shelters, where they're there 60 days or 90 days. But a horse goes into a rescue, and it takes almost a year for them to be rehabilitated or retrained, or do themselves ready to go out and be adopted. And so that means that

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: it's really hard for us to think about. If we even if we have 25% capacity available.

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: we don't have all the financial or other resources that are necessary in order to intake that population. So this is a data point that we use a lot to try to figure out how we're gonna help rescues and sanctuaries across the country be able to

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: decrease length of stay, move horses through the system faster. Get them adopted sooner. And how do we help them stand up programs that ensures that they've got what they need in order to do the work that they do. So this was a new step for us.

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Kris Hiney: Yeah. So I assume, I literally just did a podcast with Dr. Corin bump. And we were talking about nonprofit. So that's why we were kind of talking about that, and I wonder, you know, cause she was talking about all these

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Kris Hiney: liquidity things and stuff that you have to do. But do a lot of the rescues like I would assume that they try to not hit a hundred percent capacity, because that's a scary place to be so that they try to.

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Kris Hiney: you know, give themselves always just a little bit of wiggle room, just to be practical because of the what ifs.

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: Ex. That's exactly right. And I can also say we've had more conversations in the last few years about a national network for rescue horses.

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: so if we have somebody who calls us and says, I need to surrender 5 horses, and the local rescue says I can't take all 5, then do they have contacts in neighboring areas where they can make sure horses get placed. So we've been having more and more of those kinds of conversations cause you're right. They don't want to go to 100 if they can help it.

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Kris Hiney: Yeah, that that's bad. So we don't have a comparison then about what those numbers are from last time, around, because this is the first time we're collecting that data. But important data to have.

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: Yeah. Yeah. Good data to have

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: I'll also tell your listeners we did, and something different this time than we did in 2017. So generally, when you do an economic impact study, you stick with just getting the facts and figures, you need to figure out the economic impact.

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: You don't ask consumer preference questions. You don't ask all these other things. But this time we said, Okay, here's our opportunity. We ask a lot of stakeholders. What would be maybe a only a handful of questions that we should ask to sort of get at some of this. So we produce 2 reports. This time we have the full economic impact study. And then we have an appendices is what we're calling it.

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: And the appendices contains all of these questions that were like that consumer data. And I've got a couple of examples to share. So like we said, how have price increases in equine products? You purchase change, how you buy.

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: And what we heard from the respondents was that the large majority, almost 60% of them said, I'm shopping around for a deal more than I ever have.

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: Not surprising there. A couple of percentages were in the I'm buying, or I'm using less kind of category. And then some said I'd switch to a lower cost alternative.

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: So that's sort of some interesting data, especially that we share with. You know, our partners who are in the

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: feed, the supplement space, who are kind of curious about what consumers are thinking about this time we ask a question if prices stay at higher levels. How will that impacthHow many horses you own?

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: And what we clearly heard out of that was sort of hey? 2 answers that will kind of write neck and neck. This isn't gonna impact how many horses I own at all that that's good number. Okay? But also on the same vein we heard. If I lose one or more horses I will not replace them. I'm like, Okay, I can see that all right. We had a couple of a good number of people that said, I, will postpone a planned acquisition.

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: so we'll sort of see how that affects horse ownership as we go forward.

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Kris Hiney: Yeah, I I always kinda chuckle because my, and go a little pasture management here. My colleagues that you know, deal with beef cattle extension. Talk about stocking density, and I always like it's as many horses as people have. That's their stocking density, right? So they don't typically get rid of them like the cattle people do. But I could see that they're like, Okay, well, something happens that just the new one won't come back. So that that makes sense to me quite a bit. Just in horse people. Mentality.

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: Great right one of the numbers that I'm really excited about. This is the first time we've collected. This was we asked people to tell us how many people they employ full time and part time. And then we asked, how many additional workers could you have used last year?

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: And out of all the respondents we did a whole little forecast and projection and it was interesting, because what it told us was that our industry could employ almost a 124,000 more people full time or part time when we scale that number to the national level.

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: Number one answer, of course, was, I need grooms. I need barn help. I need hot walkers. That's not gonna change. I think we hear that all the time. But I was really surprised. That number 2? Answer was, I need more farm maintenance workers. I'm assuming those are people that mow and fix fences and those kinds of things.

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: And number 3. Answer was, I need more trainers.

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: Like, Oh, okay, and then last was managers. Whether that was Barns or sales or breeding. But we need more managers. So plenty of job opportunities for the right people, you know, out there in the space. And you know our industry relies a lot on foreign workers.

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: Who are here on visas. So this is the kind of data I really need when I'm going to a Congressional office and say, Give us more visas because we need help. And now I have a number to actually say, see how many more people we could employ if you could give us some more visas.

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Kris Hiney: Yeah, no, that's super important. Because I I there's only so many, you know, teenagers that you can get to clean stalls right? And you know, college grads are like, that's not what they wanna do. So yeah, it's real and important stuff. So you know. Thank you for bringing that to the attention of our leadership.

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: Well, so I'm gonna talk a minute. Now, when I started this about how we use this data. So in Washington or at the state level, or even at the local level. I will give you some examples. This data is really really useful in persuading people educating people first on our industry, and all the breadth and depth, and all the nuances, but also persuading them to support certain types of legislation or regulation.

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: Everybody knows this was a 2 years ago was supposed to be the year of the Farm Bill. It got postponed, and it's postponed in a post on. We hope it's gonna happen this year. But we use this data to go in and say, Okay, we need more funding for the Horse Protection Act. We need more funding to help us with the National Animal Vaccine and Countermeasure Bank. We need more funding for the veterinary Medicine Loan repayment program, which is all about getting vets into rural communities.

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: So we go in and say, This is the horse population we have. This is what we're contributing to the economy. This is why you need to help us. Sub, you know, and help sure up these programs that are part of the farm bill.

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: So I'm really trying to use those numbers in a way that resonates, especially when you go into a Congressional office. If I'm going to go in and knock on their door. I want to say this is how many horses you have in your State. This is how many horse owners you have in your State

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: course. Owners turn into voters and constituents. This is why you should care about what our industry is doing, and you should hear us out about ways that we need. You guys to help us ensure that we have good herd health. That's a phrase I use all the time Chris heard health is so important.

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: I I need to concentrate on disease, mitigation, and all the things that we need to do to ensure that we don't have something come into the country and run rampant like avian flu is right now, you know.

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Kris Hiney: Dairy cows.

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: So we use those numbers to sort of make the case that hey? We need. We need your help. But we also use them when we go into other agencies. So, for example, when we're talking to

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: the occupational safety and help administration, Osha, they're looking at worker safety regulations in the Ag space, especially as it relates to heat, related injuries and illnesses. And so we try to use the numbers to help them understand how many people we have working in these jobs and what their exposure is and what we need to do there. We talk about things like fire code regulation. Believe it or not. There's an organization

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: who writes model code for fire regulations, and I think during my tenure at the American horse council. This is the second time they have come to us, saying, we need to put sprinkler systems in all horse facilities that are over, such and such a size.

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: And I say, have you been to a horse facility out in the rural area? This not connected to a main waterline, and probably does not have any access to the type of pressurized water they would need to substantiate a sprinkler system in their barn. It's just not gonna happen

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: physically. It's just not. So we're trying. We try to educate them and say, Okay, this is how many horses we have. And here's how many of them are in small medium or large barns.

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: Certainly you might need to sprinkler, say, the backside of a racetrack where you've got hundreds and hundreds of stalls. That might be a thing, but in a small facility, where Kris, in her backyard, has a little barn with 4 or 5 horses in it, asking Kris to put a sprinkler system in might be a bit of a stretch. So again, we use the data for all those kinds of purposes to try to argue all these things.

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: Your listeners are welcome to call me and talk to me about any of these kinds of things. Just because we're so dysfunctional in DC. On the legislative side. The regulatory side is booming. I mean, there's just so much going on the regulatory side. I can talk all day long about pirates and road into sides, and, you know, import export rules and all the things that are on the regulatory side. So we do a lot of. We do a lot of agency work in DC.

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Kris Hiney: Gotcha gotcha. Yeah, no, that's good cause, I assume like, and I wouldn't want this job ever, but probably like me running a nonprofit

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Kris Hiney: like. Because if you're going to do a Congressional officers officer, whatever like everybody goes in there saying, like, my thing is important. Nobody goes in and be like, hey? Guess what? You don't need to worry about us right.

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: I think that's right. I don't know when they're doing that.

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Kris Hiney: So how? How do you make the story so that they like really listen? Or is it just in the sea of everything that's happening out there. You just try to argue a little harder.

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: No, I will tell you, and we're getting ready for our annual conference in June, and we do what's called a fly in. So when people come to our conference we take them up on the hill and we go into offices. And we always coach them that the best thing you can do is make it personal. Tell your story about why you're involved in industry, what it means to you find that relationship with that Congressional member that kind of resonates and get them engaged.

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: and then talk about the issue walking into an office and just kind of slapping down. You know a paper on their desk. It says, I need your support for Xyz. That doesn't work you. It's all about relationship building. And it's all about figuring out how to connect with them.

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: I give you a great example. Somebody pretty smart, and I don't know who it was that I need to give credit to invited Representative Andy Barr from Kentucky, to come out to an equine, assisted services, facility to a therapeutic riding facility for an event that they were having when he went out there. He was so impressed with the work that they were doing, and he got to meet a couple of veterans who was who were out there taking riding

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: he came back and he wrote a piece of legislation to fund for the Veterans Administration, and they get several $1 million a year. This for equal assisted services for veterans who are struggling with PTSD or other challenges, and he totally stood that program up because he saw it, and he got passionate about it and really got behind it. So it takes that kind of thing where you

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: you really make that connection. And you really get Congressional members engaged in in the issues that you're working on.

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Kris Hiney: Okay. So you should take them all on a big giant trail ride.

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. You know, it's really funny. We no longer do. We have. We used to have at least 2 or 3 large animal veterinarians that were Congressional members. And that's not true anymore. So it's really interesting to go up there, and you can find a handful of them that have had some kind of the memorable experience with a horse and things can really

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: resonate with them. But it's not that simple anymore, because most of them did not grow up in that agricultural background, or necessarily around horses.

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Kris Hiney: Yeah, yeah.

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Kris Hiney: well, this has been a great little update. So I appreciate the state of the Union is largely positive. So and excited to see I'd be really excited in the 5 years. And don't worry. 5 years is a while. You got time. You got time. If the horse numbers go back up with all of the prices, so that'll be an interesting journey for us in the industry. So.

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: Yeah, I I agree. I'm really curious to see how the trends keep going. This at this stage.

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Kris Hiney: Yeah, I mean, heck, everybody likes a good graph. So it.

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Julie Broadway American Horse Council: Well, thanks again, Kris, and thanks to your listeners for coming in to hear all about this. And again, go to our website. It's Www. Horse council.org, and you can check out some of the other facts and figures if you if you want there, or if you have specific questions. You can drop me an email. It's J. Broadway altogether@horsecouncil.org. And I'm happy to try to answer any questions you have.

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Kris Hiney: Very good. Well, I appreciate that, and I assume we'll also be creating some fun infographics and little things for you guys to visually see what's going on in our horse industry. So appreciate your time. And this has been another edition of our tach box talk horse stories with a purpose.

Tack Box Talk

The State of the Union: The story of the current status of the horse industry

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