Touchwood Diary

July 2010

Well, a very good indication of how the season is going is the fact that I have not managed to find the time to sit down and write my monthly diary since May!

It has been a very busy season for us, and part and parcel of being a smaller, family run stud is that we don’t have hoards of staff to do all the work for us. Dave and I do all the foal watching ourselves throughout the season, which inevitably means quite a few days working on very little sleep! Laura has also been working hard, her first full season working on a stud, I think she’s coming to terms with how much work it involves! The horse industry is notoriously unforgiving on employees, but we try and do as much as we can to make people’s lives easier – a 5 day week for instance, rather than the 6 day week that most equestrian employees do. Having said that, it’s certainly not a 9-5 job, particularly in season.

The foaling season has now finished for us, and we’re very proud to have a full quota of healthy mares and foals born. Other than the odd hairy moment, most have been simple births. One of the things I feel very passionately about is mares being foaled down by professionals – there are a number of scenarios during foaling where the quick and skilful intervention by someone who knows exactly what they are doing will make the different between life and death. No matter how wonderful you think it will be to foal down your own mare, it is incomparable to how distressing it would be to lose your foal, or possibly your mare because you didn’t have the skills to deal with a problem. That is my annual soapbox subject, so now I have that off my chest, onto our new arrivals…..

…our own breeding program often sits in the background due to the amount of work with visiting mares and stallions we do. However, I am always spending my evenings (and nights on foal watch!), looking at bloodlines and results, and more importantly, looking at horses. I’ve always taken quite an instinctive approach with horses and my number one criteria when breeding or buying anything, is that I have to really like the horse involved. It’s not enough for me to have a graded stallion, or a fashionable stallion, or something that is proven in sport….I also need to really LIKE the horse itself. That approach has served me pretty well over the years, so it’s something I’m sticking with! So this year, we’ve welcomed four of our own foals. The first arrival was Touchwood Rockin’ Ruby, a bay filly out of Mo-Jo and by Woodlander Rockstar. I like this filly very much, but I strongly suspect she will be for sale – I’ve decided that her mother needs a lot more blood to produce suitable fillies to outcross to TB’s and produce eventers. Ruby is very much like her mother, with a bit of exotic-ness from Rockstar and paces to die for. She will be a cracking little dressage horse. To this end, Mo-Jo has been put to a TB, Weston Justice, for her 2011 foal. This for me is one of the exciting parts of breeding – seeing what each mare produces and gradually tweaking your requirements over the years.

We then had two half brothers – both by Groomsbridge May I, and both very different. ‘Stuart’ is out of a county winning ID mare, and is a real ‘proper’ horse. Fantastic temperament, well put together and a really useful type. His half brother ‘Bradley’ AKA Touchwood Hot Spice, is out of our Fleetwater Opposition mare, Posh Spice. We bred a full sibling last year, who sold as a foal, so lovely to have a replacement! This is one very exciting foal, plenty of blood and will be a lovely rangy type…he has already wowed the judges at Solihull Futurity, gaining a High First Premium in the eventing section.

Our final foal was out of our Criminal Law mare Ell Bee Bee, and by Vagebont who has stood with us this season. Ell Bee Bee is a great producer and never fails to have a good foal, and Daisy AKA Touchwood Notevole is no exception. Really nicely put together, compact, neat and with bags of presence. I am thrilled with her.

So in terms of our own stock, it’s been a great year, all my girls have done me proud! As I said above, Mo-Jo is in foal to Weston Justice; we also have Posh Spice to Kings Composer, our new mare, Tupgills Flight to Primitive Proposal, and my old mare, Killarney Queen also to Primitive Proposal. Ell Bee Bee will now have a year off before being put to Mighty Magic early in 2011.

The AI season is still rumbling on with people still bringing mares to us, and stallion collections still very busy.

We found this year, as did many people that mares were later in starting their cycles; probably due to our snowy arctic conditions in April! This has been problematic in some cases, but as usual we have kept plugging away, sticking with the procedures we know work, and look to be on track for excellent stats again this year. It has been our first full season working with Greg Staniek from Bourton Vale, and it really has been a pleasure. Greg and I have a similar approach to stud work – being systematic and leaving no stone unturned; it is so refreshing to work with a vet who is unfailingly generous with his free time – evenings and weekends do not exist in season! And this really is the secret of getting good pregnancy rates with a large variety of mares and different semen – don’t leave anything to chance, monitor the mares carefully and act if you find any problems.

Now we start to think of winding down in terms of stud work, the showing season is well upon us. We don’t tend to go to many of the county shows, due to time constraints, but we are avid supporters of the BEF Futurity series – both as a concept, and for the excellent experience it gives the young horses. We also support the breed societies by taking part in mare grading, foal branding and regional and championship shows.

So as you can see, there really is no rest for the wicked! I am hoping to make time to write an August entry, where I can give a fuller account of the prepping process for shows, and how we deal with things on the day.

May 2010

As promised…..the season swings ever more into action, and there are more new arrivals on the ground, including the first of our own foals, a beautiful dark brown filly out of Mo-Jo and by Woodlander Rockstar. This filly may be for sale as she doesn’t really fit into our event breeding plans, however we shall see how she develops. I am a champion of the thoroughbred when it comes to event breeding but I am not so narrow minded to be unable to see that an injection of warmblood jump and movement can be helpful. Our breeding program is all part of a long plan to produce what we feel is the perfect event horse which will have a large quantity of ‘blood’ – this may take a number of generations to get to though, so when presented with a quality filly who may give the opportunity to pass this on and be crossed back to the thoroughbreds, it is tempting to keep her!

We have another new arrival here too in a form of a new broodmare for our breeding program. She is a full thoroughbred, bred in Ireland by Be My Chief. She has lovely breeding in the form on Danzig on the sire side and Saddlers Wells on the damside, and you can certainly tell she has Saddlers Wells blood with her colouring and flecks of white through her tail! More importantly, she fulfils our critera of being tough, sound, well put together and with a good temperament. She is already graded with SHB(GB) and will probably do some thoroughbred classes at the various breed shows this year. She has just been scanned in foal to Primitive Proposal, a foal we are very excited about, so already the countdown begins to next year!

In addition to the new arrivals, life at Touchwood is rather organised chaos at the moment, with a large amount of vet work to be done. Our stud vet Greg Staniek from Bourton Vale is here every day, and we have also enjoyed working with the fantastic John Newcombe this season, who is doing our Embryo Transfer work with Greg. Having so many mares on site means having to be super organised and record keeping is so important. Not only does it allow you to keep track easily of what you need to be doing each day, but it provides a valuable resource to look back on each year. Many of our visitors come back each season, so it’s really helpful to know what treatment we gave them and how they cycled last year as they often follow a similar pattern.

So, by the stocks we have a white board showing each mare and what she was doing on each day and the treatment she had. On a weekly basis, I transfer this into my paper files where it lives in our archives ready to be looked back on.

I keep equally as anal records regarding the foalings, as again, it is helpful to look back on – showing what time the mare foaled, what signs she gave, time the foal got up, time it suckled, time it passed meconium etc etc.

Already we have the first pregnancies confirmed, but as seems to be the case every year, people seem to be leaving their mares later and later and our season ends up stretching into September as it did last year! I don’t know if this is an inevitable consequence of the fact the start of our Spring seems to have been delayed for the last few years. Not only do the mares start cycling later, but lots of people also seem to be in ‘winter mode’ and not quite ready to send their horses off to stud! With there often being snow on the ground in April, perhaps this is a wise decision, but its also worth bearing in mind how uncomfortable a heavily pregnant mare can be in the height of summer where again, in our ever changing climate, temperatures seem to be soaring.

On a final note, our Open Day went well, with all of the stallions looking absolutely superb. We were thrilled to have Vagebont, Up With The Lark, Marcolas G and Keystone Rivallino all showing themselves off fantastically. Lucy Graham was videoing for us, we are currently in the process of getting the videos put up on the website so you will be able to see the stallions if you did not get the chance to attend. The only non-attendees stallion wise were the lovely little quarter horse ZZ Hoss who couldn’t get to us on that day, and also our new addition to the stallion roster – Samba Hit III. This lovely young dressage stallion is in training with Emile Faurie just down the road from us and doing walk in collections, and really is a great stamp of the modern dressage horse, and seems to be popular with mare owners so far this season, as he combines collecting with a busy competition schedule.

I am mulling over whether to hold a summer Open Day to give people a chance to view the foals, but as ever, it is a case of finding space in the diary as showing season hits us by then to add to the normal day to day work.