Classical Dressage

Posted By Iris on March 26, 2010

Barbier farm is a training barn. The Barbiers have horses of their own, but a lot of the horses on the farm are horses that are being trained for other people. The amount of horses on the barn differs from time to time for that reason. At the moment though, the barn is totally full; 24 horses in the main barn, 3 horses in the little barn at the neighbors (when there are more horses, some of them will be boarded there with a paddock).

Normally there are two or three working students on Barbier farm, we are with three right now. The day starts at 7.30 AM, that is breakfast time for the horses, both main barn and little barn.. The morning is dedicated to morning chores. Nowadays often the stall cleaner (they have somebody else do the stalls on Barbier farm) comes in the morning to clean in the stalls, if the guy comes at night; some of the stalls are cleaned by us in the morning, for the horses that have thrush. That way they don’t have dirty stalls. Other chores are things like: scrubbing waterers, sweeping barn aisle, de-webbing (spiderwebs) when necessary, cleaning and watering the (sometimes a bit dusty) arena, and other normal barn stuff.

When chores are done, the grooming of the horses starts. We groom all the horses that Debra and Shanna (Assistant trainer) will longe. This way they can focus on the longeing and go lunge horse after horse. We all have assigned a few horses to groom. We will brush them, and if they have poopy stains (especially the white horses) we will wash them (unless it is very cold), pick their hoofs and remove the wood flakes out of their manes and tails. We don’t touch their manes and tails without putting show shine or cowboy magic in them every ones in a while. This detangles and gives a shine Before I never cared for that kind of stuff but now I see what it does, I will definitely use it on my horses! Especially when you have horses with beautiful long manes, you don’t want to do without! It makes sure they don’t get tangled into dreadlocks and you won’t have to sacrifice precious manes to get the knots out :-/

When all the horses are groomed, depending on if there is enough space in the arena and there are no customers having lessons, we (the students) will start longeing our assigned horses. I have 6 horses assigned to longe. Most of the time I won’t have to longe them all, often one or two are used for lessons by us or customers.

The horses I longe are: La Rapio (the gentle white Lusitano breeding stallion), Foedista (the wonderful student teacher, a white Lusitano Thoroughbred cross), Fandango (the goofy (he thinks he is great Lusitano stallion) and also good teacher, a Morgan gelding), Pracz (owned by a customer, Arabian gelding with an attitude), Orgulo (sweet flea bitten Lusitano stallion, I call him freckles) and Nabucco (soft, beautiful dreamy eyed, grey Lusitano Thoroughbred cross). Horses that don’t get longed that day will be turned out for 20 minutes in the arena.

Around noon it is feeding time, all the horses get fed three times a day. The horses in the little barn will get turned out in paddocks if it doesn’t rain to much.

If there are customers who have lessons, the students can watch the lessons. This is a learning opportunity as well. Obviously we will have to make sure everything is ok in the barn and we will have to tack up lessons horses for the customers, but in between those chores we will watch lessons.

After or in between longeing and customer lessons the working students will get their mounted lesson. I will ride Foedista, Fandango or Pracz. Of course this is the highlight of the day! This is why I am here… Every horse is a great teacher in his own way. I have to say Foedista is the most ‘difficult’. He is relentless and stubborn ) when you do something slightly wrong, he will refuse to do what you are trying to ask… But of course, this makes him an excellent teacher… though it is sometimes frustrating

After the longeing, depending on how smoothly everything went, we might have an hour or so off. At the end of the day we will have to clean all the bridles that have been used. Then it is about time to feed dinner. We worked out a schedule for feeding breakfast and dinner, so the person who feeds breakfast won’t have to feed dinner etc. That way we get a bit more time off. I often feed dinner every other day; normally I won’t have to feed breakfast. And last, depending on temperatures we will have to blanket most of the horses. If it is still to warm we might have to come back later in the evening to do that.

Like I mentioned, because I normally don’t feed breakfast, I will start at 8.30AM. I get up at 7AM to start my day gently Often my day ends at 7PM, sometimes later. Often I do have a break in between of an hour, sometimes two, but sometimes I won’t have a break at all. This all depends on how the day will go. This obviously is not a 9 to 5 job; it hardly ever is when you work with animals… But that is the charm about this job; I love horses, and now I get the opportunity to work with what I love…

Category: At Barbierfarm, My story
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