She’s not ready to give up just yet, but Rita Artemenko is thinking of getting out of the horse business.
Over the last few years, prices for saddle broken horses have dropped dramatically in Alberta, making it impossible for Artemenko to make money raising and training Quarter horses at her farm near Westlock, Alta.
Three years ago, Artemenko could get a few thousand dollars for a horse but now she’s lucky to get several hundred.
A flood of cheap horses coming from the U.S., supplying the Bouvry Exports slaughter plant in Fort Macleod, Alta., has driven down the price for meat horses in the province. Meat buyers are now paying $200 to $300 for a 1,000 pound horse in Alberta, Artemenko said.
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Meat buyers set the market floor, which means recreational horse buyers can purchase broken horses for next to nothing, she said.
“If anybody there (at an auction) wants to buy the horse, they only have to be the next bid above that $200 or $300,” she said.
But that equals a financial loss for Artemenko.
“When you raise the foal for three years before you can ride it, then you put one or two months worth of training on it, at $700 or $800 a month … now you’ve got a minimum $2,000 into that horse,” said Artemenko, who runs Hazel Bluff Quarter Horses with her partner, Ken Stanley. “We can’t train our horses, keep them for three years and give them away.”
Gary Jarvis, owner of Triple J Livestock auction in Westlock, Alta., has also witnessed the severe drop in horse prices over the last few years.
“You relate it to the breeding stock. If the cow market is low, the breeding stock is low,” he said. “In the horse market, if your meat is low, your saddle horses are going to be lower.”
Meat horses are selling for 30 to 37 cents per lb., compared to 80 cents to $1 per lb. in 2007.
Jarvis said the horse market in Alberta changed in 2007, when court rulings and state legislation ended horse slaughter at the three remaining U.S. plants in Texas and Illinois.
“When that happened, all of a sudden Canada is getting flooded with American horses,” he said.
It’s difficult to track how many U.S. horses are coming into the province, said David Moss, chief operating officer of Livestock Information Services in Alberta, because some animals don’t come directly from the U.S.
“They come across at various locations across Canada, then get reassembled, repackaged and then start heading west,” he said.
“The documentation of the U.S. (origin) may not come along with them. A guy buys them and he gets all the papers from the U.S. He puts them in his yard (in Canada) for a month, then issues a new manifest to go west with them.”
Artemenko wants the import of American horses to end and has started a petition to stop the flow. She contacted federal agriculture minister Gerry Ritz. For her, the bottom line is that her herd of 250 to 300 Quarter horses is now a liability.
“We haven’t trained a horse all winter,” she said. “So now I’ve got a 150 young horses that aren’t broke to ride…. We’ll have to go through the drastic process of culling a bunch of them.”
Jarvis said Artemenko is not alone.
“There’s going to be a lot less horses kept, I’m sure of that.”
