Janelle Smith, 29, of Jamesport is in the horse business
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Janelle Smith, 29, of Jamesport is in the horse business.
It’s not about keeping a horse in the pasture, whistling it up to the fence, feeding it carrots, and galloping off into the sunset with your riding buddies. It’s not even about admiring the beauty of the animal — although a good eye for horseflesh is essential for success.
It’s about profit. And in the horse business that means competition. For Janelle that means getting ready for the show ring.
“It’s a high dollar deal,” says Janelle, who shows halter horses in the Missouri and National American Quarter Horse and Futurities in the Fall. “Competing in the shows costs a lot. But my feeling is I need to be there for the advertising. To let buyers know I’m still in existence. They need to see what our stallions are producing.”
Exposure is one aim of the shows. Prestige is another — points won during the shows makes the horse and its offspring worth more on the market.
Janelle, along with her father, J. Ray, have 52 head of horses and 16 foals on their farm south of Jamesport. They breed horses and raise pleasure and halter horses. This breeding season they stood three stallions (Levi Zipper, Ima Best Array and The Levi Logo) and plan to also add a son of Docomos to next year’s roster.
The main stud on the ranch at this time is the renowned Levi Zipper. They have had the stallion since he was seven years old and he is now 26. Levi lives in his same stall that he’s had for 19 years. At his age, they take special care of him and do all they can to ensure that he is happy and healthy in his environment. He’s very much a part of the family.
“He’s done a lot for us and our reputation, we owe most of the success of our horse operation to this horse,” says Janelle.
Levi Zipper has sired five reserve royal champions in halter, pleasure, western riding and trail, and has over 300 registered babies. His colts are in Alaska, Germany, Italy and all over the United States.
Ninety percent of the brood mares in the Smith’s stables are his daughters.
Levi Zipper, with his muscular physique, is a model American Quarter Horse. Quarter Horses are the body builders of the horse industry and are known for their sturdy conformation — a name given to the overall size and shape of the horse’s body.
During the halter classes, the horse — with no saddle — is judged based on its resemblance to the breed ideal. Janelle will select a colt to train for the shows with this standard of perfection in mind.
“He should be a cross between a football player and a wrestler,” says Janelle. “He should have as much mass and weight as his legs can hold and yet be a pretty, fine boned horse, and most of all be structurally correct.”
Their newest long-term show prospect is a January baby named Coolottes. The Smiths plan to take three to the fall futurities this year.
Janelle will have to turn the awkward, gangling colt into a strong, supple show horse that can wow the judges in the ring.
How early she can start training the colt depends on the mare. Some mares won’t tolerate breaking the colt before he’s weaned. When he’s about six months old, he’ll be broke to show in the arena.
“The horse is growing so fast, training has to be a daily deal,” Janelle says. “I’ll do something with him every day. He’ll be led, worked, set up, brushed, and the neck sweated.”
The colt will be trained to lead and “whoa” and spit-shined. But there’s more to showing in halter than walking the horse around the ring or teaching him to stand still or look pretty.
Judges will look for a conditioned athlete. The horse should be the picture of radiant health with a toned body. He should be well muscled, not too lean, not too fat.
He’ll be the finished product of a program Janelle has put together herself. It will include a specific breeding program; a stringent feeding schedule; and proper fitness training, which is different for each individual horse.
Janelle will continue the rigorous conditioning of the horse through the hot summer months.
“You can’t get them sick. It’s touch and go. Next week the horse may fall apart. If you push him too hard, problems arise. A colt also may go through a rapid growth spurt and the whole routine has to be adjusted. You have to count on luck sometimes; hope the horse will be at its best when its time to show.”
Halter is a non-riding competition and that suits Janelle just fine. She loves horses, but growing up she wasn’t really much of one for riding.
“I wouldn’t go out and ride. I wasn’t a little wild kid riding all over the country.”
Janelle started showing horses in 4-H. Then she graduated to the American Quarter Horse Association. Then she began youth competition.
The horses she began showing as a youngster taught her some valuable lessons at a time when the pressure wasn’t on to be perfect. Old Joe, for instance, didn’t care a whit about what impressed the judges.
“He’d lay down and roll during the shows. Nothing embarrasses me anymore.”
In youth competition, she showed with a temperamental gelding.
“He was a young gelding full of himself. He’d try to rear up and strike me in the ring. He may not have been what most kids should start with, but after dealing with him I could handle about any horse.”
And Janelle did learn — well enough to qualify for the World Show every year.
She changed to Amateur competition in college and showed a mare named Elegant Array.
“I’d show and show her and not win. Our luck just wasn’t working. We hauled and hauled and hauled her to get her qualified.”
The effort paid off.
“She was fifth place at the American Quarter Horse Association in Amateur. That put her in with the top ten and that was a major deal. She was good enough to win against the big boys. She did a lot for me.”
Janelle sold Elegant Array after the World Show.
One horse is about all Janelle can afford to haul to the shows and it needs to be a good one.
“The shows are money driven,” Janelle says, “I can be standing in the arena with $75-100,000 horses.“I would find myself standing by a country music singer’s wife in the ring.”
The shows are tough to get into, but her father had made a name for himself.
J. Ray has been breeding horses for 30 years, starting in the 70s. Her father began buying retired show mares, the best he could afford. He took the horses to a trainer in Togonoxie, Kan. The horses were trained, for show, riding, cutting and reining. Within 10 years his horses had earned him a spot on the Top 10 List of AQHA breeders.
“They were in the right hands at the right time,” says Janelle.
The winning mares in their stables now are the granddaughters of those mares.
Prize winners over the years include Wildest Rendezvous who they bred to a stud owned by a producer in Texas. It was big decision to quit showing the mare and decide to breed her. They named the colt Coolottes. Many other mares have either won futurities or are producers of point earning offspring at AQHA level. Levi Zipper, himself, earned his AQHA Register of Merit with points in Western Pleasure and halter. Janelle also showed World Champion Palomino stallion, Wildest at the Palomino Horse Breeders Association, as well as AQHA shows. Impressive Too also helped to improve and build the Smith’s remuda. While they owned him he earned his AQHA Championship in points in halter, pleasure, and reining.
Her father has won at the weanling futurities for the past 13 years.
“It’s quite an accomplishment when you consider we’re showing horses we’ve raised against some big breeder with 300 to choose from and a lot of funding to go on.”
While Janelle travels to the shows, her father stays and tends the farm and livestock while she’s gone. Janelle and her parents also have cattle and a few hogs and raise soybeans and corn and hay.
A few of those hauls have been plagued by misfortune. The most memorable occurred in 1993; the year of the flood.
It was the last weekend of competition. The mare, Elegant Array, needed one more point to be eligible for the World Show. Janelle and her mother, Jayla, who teaches family and consumer sciences, and who’s “not a real horse person” were headed for Denison, Iowa. It was raining and blowing hard and they could barely keep the truck on the road.
They stopped at a hotel and it was full of tornado spotters — definitely a bad sign.
“Here I had the three-year-old mare, worth who knew how much standing in a two horse trailer.
The hotel staff offered to put newspapers down in the lobby and let me bring her into the hotel if I needed to and I really did give it consideration.”
They continued on up to Denison.
They couldn’t find the fair grounds and noticed all the trailers were going west. They followed the trailers and decided that wasn’t right and went back down again. By that time they’d closed the road behind them and evacuated the town of Dow City, Iowa.
They wound up in Dow City, about the size of Lock Springs. They had opened up the school and were bringing old folks by ambulance from a flooded trailer park.
Meanwhile, the mare was still on the trailer.
“The mare wouldn’t eat, she wouldn’t drink. She needed to lay down and rest. Mom was inside making sandwiches for people.”
They found out all the horse trailers had left because there was seven foot of water in the stalls.
There was no way out of the town. The school filled up and they stayed all night there. The next morning, they finally found a man who knew a way over a gravel road that was open. They followed him and made it to a filling station where they found a phone and called home.
They headed for Nebraska where there was another show going on.
They got there and unloaded the mare and made their entries. They had time to change clothes and go to the ring. By then the mare had been on the trailer for 24 hours.
But she got her point.
“It was a good show,” Janelle recalls. “Everybody else’s horse was gaunted up, too. They all looked pretty horrible.”
Janelle went to college at Northeastern Oklahoma A&M, then transferred to Oklahoma Panhandle State University. She received a degree in animal science, agri-business, and vo-ag education. She has minors in agronomy and business administration. While in Oklahoma she helped at a Paint Horse Halter operation and at a cutting horse facility. All the time she was in college she continued to show horses, driving back and forth for nine hours.
“It was my decision to return to the family farming operation. This farm has been in the Smith family since 1915. I use a lot of my college knowledge here, especially inn the breeding operation and marketing.”
Janelle says her favorite part of raising the horses is the breeding and the babies. The Smith’s don’t have a lot of out-crossed mares, that is mares sired by an outside stud, unless they’ve kept a baby for a brood mare.
Breeding season runs from Feb. 1 through June 15.
“It’s much different than our cattle operation. It’s not like clockwork. All mares aren’t ‘textbook’ situations to breed and settle. The national average to settle a mare is just 70%. They are not a reproductive animal.”
She tries to be there to help when the mares foal, which means getting up the night every three hours. Foals are vaccinated, iodined and handled all over within minutes of birth. The mare is also watched closely.
“We wait until the foal is up and started nursing before we decide weather we can go back to bed,” says Janelle.
In April she saw three foals born on one day Janelle wanted to grow up to be a veterinarian when she was a kid and does practice a strict vaccination and deworming program.
No amount of conditioning can keep a horse from scratches, sprains and other daily afflictions.
“There’s an old joke,” says Janelle. “There wouldn’t be any vets if it weren’t for horses. They’re accident prone.”
It’s not always minor mischief they get into. Janelle had two horses get sick last year from the West Nile virus. One was a very valuable mare, who was in foal. The mare started showing signs of infection. They called the vet and he drew blood and put the mare on IVs.
“It was about more than I could handle,” says Janelle. “It was heartbreaking to see them going down and she was going down hill fast. Even though this is a business, we are very close to our mares.”
Both horses recovered and the mare had a perfect baby.
After that, they began vaccinating.
“If I didn’t know, I’d ask, and learn. I had my book knowledge and dad had his experience.
Sometimes our minds would be rolling. We’d compare thoughts and make a decision.”
Janelle is working on a web site and has sold three horses over the Internet, to Indiana, Kentucky and St. Louis.
“It’s not my favorite way to market, but these deals have run smoothly. I’m still more comfortable selling directly off the farm. Wherever the sale is made, I have to have a satisfied customer. If I don’t think the horse is suitable for what the client needs, I won’t sell it to them.”
They try to sell the horses under two years of age in order to get them into other people’s hands so they will show or breed them.
“If you’re not precise, the longer you keep them, the more money you put in them and the less money you make.”
She takes the horses to consignment sales in west Kentucky every year. One of her two-year-olds, Locomotion, topped the sales there as the highest priced horse in the November sale.
The Smith’s horse operation may be a business, but, says Janelle, “The greatest reward comes from just being able to do what I love.”