The equine industry, inside and outside of racing, has faced a labor crisis for some time now. You've read the headlines about the ongoing shortage of equine veterinarians, but farm managers will tell you it's also a struggle to find people who want to groom and muck stalls in all weather conditions.
For many years, farms have relied on guest worker visa programs to supply labor to their businesses, but in recent years, many have found it's increasingly difficult to get the number of visas they need, and that it's increasingly expensive to bring H-2A and H-2B visa holders over to meet the need.
There was a time when farms, especially those in horse-centric places like Central Kentucky, filled their labor needs with energetic college students or recent graduates from animal science and equine science programs. Now that many universities have undergraduate degree programs that have been going strong for many years, it's probably easy to wonder from afar – how can there be a shortage of any kind of worker in the horse industry when we have so many higher education programs focused on horses?
The answer is complex.
The typical college student
It may surprise you to learn that some of the nation's larger equine studies programs get a significant number of students who did not grow up riding or handling horses.
Dr. Jim Heird has had a long career in equine academics, from associate dean and director of academic programs at Colorado State University to executive professor and coordinator of the Equine Initiative at Texas A&M University. He's now one of the coordinators of a new, equine-focused veterinary degree program at Lincoln Memorial University in Tennessee.
Heird recalls doing surveys of incoming freshmen to the equine programs at CSU and TAMU in the early 2000s. At both programs, he found that roughly 25 percent of incoming students who had no horse experience at all; another 25 percent may have ridden a friend's horse or been on one at summer camp; 25 percent had owned a horse and could demonstrate basic horsemanship skills, and the final 25 percent grew up on a farm or ranch.
In his new role at Lincoln Memorial University, Heird has engineered a veterinary degree program that's paired with an associate degree program in equine studies. His goal is to reduce some of the barriers to entry for equine veterinarians – cost of schooling and difficulty of admissions to vet school.
In large part, Heird is hoping he can attract an ever-shrinking portion of equine science students today – those who grew up with horses in the backyard.
“We're recruiting horse kids,“ he said. “The farms in Kentucky, the farms in the Quarter Horse industry are really excited about this. The interest is growing as the news gets out there.
“All of those kids will be in that last 25 percent.”
Heird said that when he began his career, the four-year undergraduate agriculture programs at universities were much more commonly filled with students who had grown up on a farm or ranch. Most of them were probably going to complete a degree and resume the trajectory they'd already begun toward managing or owning their own facility. Today, the population looks different.
Craig Huffhines, current director of equine sciences at CSU, said the equine sciences program has about 320 undergraduates, 80 percent of whom come from an urban or suburban background.
“The majority of those have limited hands-on equestrian experience but they love the horse,” said Huffhines. “They've been around a horse a few times and they seek to pursue knowledge of horsemanship and are exploring opportunities.
“It's interesting that urban/suburban kids who have never grown up around it are inspired to seek knowledge and a career path in that field without growing up in it.”
It seems there can be program-to-program variability in the makeup of incoming students' hands-on experience with horses. Instructors at the University of Kentucky estimated only 10 percent of their incoming students appear to have zero to minimal handling experience. A number of smaller undergraduate programs at private colleges cater to existing riders with ambitions of becoming riding instructors, and would seem to be getting students with more hands-on experience.
At the Bluegrass Community and Technical College (BCTC)'s Equine Studies program, program coordinator and associate professor Dixie Kendall said she too encounters a mix of experience levels among incoming students.
“We get students who have never touched a horse a day in their life, who grew up reading Black Beauty and the Thoroughbred [book] series,” said Kendall.
Kendall says the program also sees people who got interested in racing because they grew up going to the races and betting on horses, and decided they wanted to get their hands dirty. Aaron West, now the nominations manager at Juddmonte, is a graduate of BCTC's program who decided to make a career in the business this way. Still others are already confident around horses and want to learn the science behind the concepts they're already familiar with.
Many equine science programs require a basic horse handling class, though these classes at four-year college are not designed to take a student from zero experience on the end of a lead shank to walk/trot/canter in the saddle, or even to have them emerge as completely polished showpeople at a public horse auction. Program administrators agree that's not practical. Instead, college programs at those four-year universities seek to give them some basic understanding of equine behavior through practical learning, a thorough understanding of the science behind equine management, and an overview of the broad career possibilities awaiting them.
The two-year program at BCTC is different, and more heavily-focused on turning out employable graduates who can safely work in a racing barn or on the farm. Kendall said the program combines lab classes in the barn with virtual classes focusing on the science of management, and many students complete the virtual part of the program while working at a paid internship set up for them by the school. But like the four-year programs, she believes an important part of the BCTC program's role is helping students make connections.
“We know how tightknit the industry is, and the ability to call up a trainer at Keeneland and get a foot in the door is really crucial,” she said.
What students need to know
Educators agreed that for the incoming student, it's important to understand how you mesh with the program you've applied to. Dr. C. Jill Stowe, director of undergraduate studies in equine science and management at the University of Kentucky, said that like CSU's program, UK's is very science-heavy. Both programs require the student to take general math, chemistry, and biology classes before they get down to the species-specific science that may be more intuitive.
Stowe said that when students don't come in with a strong background in these subjects, it can be a real problem.
“If nothing else, that just increases the length of time it takes for our students to complete the degree,” she said. “They have to complete a certain level of math before they can get into chemistry, which students need before they can get into biology. If those types of skills in general tend to be challenging for students, sometimes they have to take some of those courses more than once, and ultimately, some students decide it's not the right major for them.”
Huffhines says that when he surveys a new class of equine studies freshmen, many of them want to either become a professional trainer or a veterinarian. Thanks in part to the rigor of the science courses they go through, only about 17 or 18 percent of the senior class remain dedicated to their dream of becoming veterinarians. Very few will be suited to becoming professional trainers, either.
The good news for the equine industry is that a third of the students who revised their career plans go into academic animal science research, while the other two-thirds look for jobs in the equine business world.
For students who come from urban or suburban backgrounds, the basic elements of working with horses can also come as a rude awakening. Huffhines encourages students to complete at least three internships before graduating and frequently sets students up with equine clinics and major Thoroughbred farms in Central Kentucky so they can get a taste of staying up all night with a sick foal or wrangling horses at turnout in extreme heat and cold before they commit themselves to a pathway to becoming a vet or farm manager.
“We're finding kids to go out there, but we're not finding enough of them,” he said.
Some of them come back invigorated by the experience, while others may find it a wake-up call and wonder if they want to do it for the next 50 years. Others, especially those with little prior handling experience, rethink the hands-on roles after seeing the danger involved with wrangling 1,000-pound animals.
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The current generation of students, known as Generation Z, were born between 1997 and 2012, according to the Pew Research Center. Educators and employers alike have observed that as a group, Gen Z seems to have different priorities in their approach to education and employment. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated a growing priority for many workers towards self-care and work/life balance, and so far, it seems Gen Z is also putting a premium on these things.
“Money isn't everything,” said Laurie Mays, agriculture and equine talent pipeline project manager for the Kentucky Chamber of Commerce. “Yes, you need to pay a living wage and yes, you need to pay more than what everybody else is paying, but the generation that's coming up doesn't necessarily want a ton of money and no time off.”
At a time when more people are taking remote jobs that allow more flexibility in terms of hours and availability for child or family care, hands-on horse jobs are at a disadvantage.
Gerry Duffy, stud manager at Godolphin's Kentucky base and president of the Kentucky Thoroughbred Farm Managers Club, said that people searching for employment, whether it's right out of college or not, also have a greater range of hourly pay rates before them when looking at in-person jobs.
“We used to be a step above minimum wage jobs as far as factory jobs or restaurants and so on,” he said. “They all really upped their game. The competition was increased for a lot of the farms.”
That compensation makes a difference to graduates from four-year degree programs like the equine studies degrees at CSU or UK. In-state tuition for students at CSU for the current academic year is $12,874, while it's $32,734 for out-of-state students, and it's roughly the same at UK. Fifty percent of CSU equine students are from out-of-state, and at UK it's closer to 75 or 80 percent, though some UK students may get a price break through the Academic Common Market program. Stowe said that as states gradually reduce funding of public universities, she expects those tuition rates will continue to rise.
That means many equine science graduates are carrying significant debt when they graduate. For many of them, it doesn't seem practical to take an entry-level position grooming horses.
In Mays' role identifying the employment needs of the equine industry in Kentucky, she has found what many managers have said for years – the lowest skilled positions are the ones with the highest turnover, and they're the most crucial to a facility's function. For years, Mays saw farms focus on the employment problem as a retention issue – they struggled so much to get positions filled, they didn't want people to be interested in advancing out of that position.
The new generation of workers aren't interested in positions they may see as dead-end. That's why Mays and Kendall are identifying career pathways that start at the bottom of a farm or clinic's hierarchy and move forward into new roles. Mays said the best thing an employer can do for an entry-level employee or an intern is to give them chances to learn more and grow beyond their role. A groom who receives employer support to get their commercial driver's license may leave the farm to work for a van company, but they can still be of use to the farm.
“You're going to lose them anyway, so it's whether you support them to stay in the industry or lose them to a different industry,” Mays said.
Mays and Duffy agree that all these factors have pushed equine operations away from their old reliance on college students or recent graduates to fill those positions. Instead, they're finding other solutions.
New pathways ahead
Kendall believes BCTC's program provides an economically feasible solution for students and employers. She requires students to attend two hands-on classes in which they're graded not just in horse handling skills, but on attendance, punctuality, communication, and team-building skills. Then, they can move on to paid positions while completing the rest of their two-year degree online – all for about $11,000 a year.
“I want to give our students as realistic a perspective as possible of what they're going into,” she said. “I do feel very confident in the students who make it through the full two years of the program, they are successful in the industry and they do hold careers in the industry for long periods of time because they knew what they were walking into.”
Kendall said the four-year equine science degrees have their place and can turn out students for specific types of roles in the industry.
“I'm not a huge advocate for having a four-year university degree to work hands-on with horses,” she said. “I am a huge advocate for that if someone wants to take their career past that and move into administrative or support roles.”
The Kentucky Chamber of Commerce and the Kentucky Equine Education Project have spent the past few years examining workforce trends and working with large employers in the Central Kentucky area to find ways of making farm jobs more appealing. In addition to raising pay, allowing flexibility in scheduling may help stop some workers from burning out. While many horse care jobs are traditionally six-day work weeks, Mays has encouraged several farms to test out five-day work weeks.
Duffy said that some farms have been willing to embrace the suggestions, especially when they're most hurting for staff, but have found they also need to accommodate existing employees.
“They're used to working a 48-hour week,” he said of existing grooms on farms. “It's an hourly wage, and they're reluctant to drop the hours. If you drop it back to 40 hours, you have to increase pay to make it equitable. So there are a few things that need to be thought out. I think it's doable. Ultimately it's probably one of those things where you have to make the leap and do it.”
Besides BCTC, Duffy and Mays said many equine industry employers are looking to high schools that have co-op or internship programs as part of agricultural sciences curriculum to recruit new workers. They're also recruiting help from programs that place adults who have completed substance abuse treatment programs or who are looking to start a new career after exiting the justice system. The success of vocational prison programs through the Thoroughbred Retirement Foundation is well-documented, though employers taking on new hires who haven't completed that training need to be aware there is some need for on-the-job instruction.
In many ways, Mays says the remedy for the equine industry's employment struggles is the same as the solution for its difficulty with dwindling participation or social license concerns – marketing.
Even in Central Kentucky where the horse industry surrounds residents on their daily activities, Mays said fewer and fewer people really understand the world behind the impressive farm gates. Gone are the days when many of them knew someone who worked at a farm or stable, or who handled horses professionally. And that means not only do fewer of them know how to put a halter on a horse, they probably don't know what jobs are available to them if they're willing to learn.
“This industry is used to appealing to people employment-wise who have some idea about it,” Mays said. “They may not have grown up in it but they at least had a connection to the industry somehow. Most of the people they're hiring now, even the ones out of college programs, they don't have that background. Their only touch to the industry may have been those four years at college.
“They're trying to figure out, how do they market the industry as far as the employment piece, not just as entertainment or sports.”
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