1dr Acres Farm

Reitar was my first Fjord foal and my first stallion. He was born in September 1992 and I was just a teenager. I raised and trained him myself, without input from training professionals, and I couldn’t take him anywhere due to rules about minors handling stallions, and we didn’t have our own horse hauling equipment.

Reitar’s pedigree is here.

Reitar was born in the herd, on pasture, as have all of my subsequent foals.

His dam, Gerd, was an outstanding broodmare, for being a maiden.

We kept him with the herd until he started showing stud-like behavior around 2 years old. That early life experience in a herd made him very easy for me to train. I was much less intentional about training back then. I primarily messed around with Reitar so much that he felt like an extension of me, and he trusted me to allow me to do all kinds of silliness with him.

My training of him wasn’t formal or extensive, but he was very easily managed by me for any kind of groundwork I asked him to do. We couldn’t afford a saddle fitted to him, so I rode him bareback, and typically with just a halter and leadrope.

He grew up to be a handsome stallion.

Once he was mature, he was housed by himself in a paddock with a shelter so he couldn’t breed his dam or the Arabian mare we owned. I learned a lot about horse behavior when they are not allowed to live with a herd through this time. I’ve not housed horses individually since then, especially stallions.

I was doing the hoof trimming on my horses as a teenager, and this mucky living environment, with limited movement taught me a whole lot about hoof management. This laid the foundation for the farm layouts that I designed on subsequent farms, which naturally supported healthier hooves, bodies and minds in my horses, while making the system even better for the environment and us humans in the process. This was long before I had ever heard of EquiCulture or Track Systems.

I’m very thankful for not being able to afford to manage these horses conventionally (stalls, boarding barns, etc.) when I was young, and since I didn’t know the industry standards, I was just making choices for my horses based on how they reacted to what I provided for them. Some lessons were learned quickly, while others were discovered over time. My later formal education taught me the conventional approaches, but by then, I had enough experience doing things differently to quietly disregard the incorrect professional advice and keep managing my horses in the way that I found to produce optimal health, mentally and physically.

I didn’t breed Reitar to many mares. Here, Reitar is in the background, and my mare, Short Creek’s Amber, is living with him for breeding in 2005. I’ve always done pasture breeding with my stallions.

I bought Amber and Feld’s Gina as my broodmares to match to Reitar. Again, my grandmother provided the funds as a loan, and in time I was able to pay her back with the expanding Fjord herd I produced with her investment. I sold Gina in foal to a family in Oklahoma. As far as I know, that’s the end of that line of Fjords from Gerd and her son Reitar.

Amber’s daughters with Valea’s Vesle have continued her line in our herd though. We have Bekke, with her daughter Ilsa (by Hunter), and Gylda, with her daughter Febra (by Hunter). Vesle also sired my favorite riding horse, our stallion 1dr Ragnvald.