TACK & HORSE FARM

Tack & Farm

Our Tack & Farm section features an Apparel section to find both practical and fashionable riding attire. If you ride English & Western or Race, many sources are available in the Tack section.

Building a barn? Need an architect for your equine dream home? Find one in Barns & Stalls.

Have a hungry horse? Of course you do! Find a place to buy your feed and tuck your horse in at night in the Bedding & Feed section. Looking for a place to keep your horse? You can find it in the Horse Boarding section. Keep your horse happy and beautiful with resources in our Grooming section.

Traveling? Find a Shipping company or Horse Sitting service if your horse is staying home!

Running and maintaining a farm or stable is a continuous effort, and to help find products or tools you need, please see our Equipment, Fencing and Management Tools sections.

Seeking Services? Find financial and tax expertise in our Accounting section. Companies who will help protect your investment are found in the Insurance section. For those who want legal advice about purchasing, liability, and other issues, please look at the Equine Law section to find an expert. Build and promote your business with teams from Marketing / Videography / Web Design.

Do we need to add more? Please use the useful feedback link and let us know!

by Nick Pernokas

Brandit Franco grew up in the heart of Florida’s cowboy country. The family business was starting colts and training ranch horses. Brandit’s father, Sam Franco, took a lot of horses to ride that weren’t making it in someone else’s training program. Sam trained everything from Quarter Horses to wild Mustangs in the Seventies and Eighties. Brandit grew up working cows in southern Florida, around Okeechobee and Kissimmee, which is a different type of cowboying then most people visualize in the American West.

“I was born into it,” remembers a 47-year-old Brandit. “I cut my teeth dragging cattle out of the swamps.”

A lot of Brandit’s youth was spent in north central Florida. Sam was an ex-military man though and he was a wanderer. He trained horses all of his life, but he would move from one horse training job to another.

“He followed where his heart told him the horse business was,” says Brandit.

Brandit helped his dad with the horses and learned to ride and break them. Like many cowboys, Sam knew how to fix a saddle and tack when it was necessary.

“We weren’t rich folks by any means so we had to do our own leatherwork.”

Brandit’s first job in leatherwork was setting rivets for his dad. Brandit eventually built a few saddles with Sam, but they were pretty plain, working saddles.

The Franco family moved from Florida to the Mineral Wells, Texas area in the mid Eighties. They were only there for a few years, but Sam was friends with famed all-around cowboy Ed Workman. Ed trained horses at his indoor arena just outside of town and Brandit was able to learn how to rope calves from him. But, Brandit’s first love was competing in the saddle bronc and bareback bronc riding events and the roping never replaced that.

Brandit’s family moved to New Mexico in 1993, which was his final year in high school. As a senior, he rode bareback broncs at the high school rodeos, but a back injury forced him to hang up his rigging for good after that. After that, Brandit’s bronc riding was limited to the horse training kind.

“My dad said that if I wanted to ride broncs, I didn’t have to do it for a buckle. He had plenty for me to ride right at the house.”

In 1994, the family made their final move to San Antonio, Texas. Sam kept training outside horses and he also had a small leather repair shop.

Leatherwork by South African leathercraft artist Arran Wood (Photo courtesy of Shop Talk Magazine)

by Gene Fowler

As I sat wondrously immersed in the universe of the television program Yellowstone during its recently concluded fourth season—the hats, the horses, ranchers, cowboys, pretty women, gorgeous country, and a lone guitar—the notion that folks might have been savoring the same scenery on the other side of the world was the farthest thing from my mind.

The Republic of South Africa, for instance. Like many, if not most, Americans, my awareness of the nation on the southern tip of the African continent was so limited that it might as well have been on Mars. Then Shop Talk! asked me to write about the young South African leathercraft artist Arran Wood, who Instagram’s his beautiful and unique creations of equine tack with the handle @woodenwulf.

And when I asked Arran to tell me a little about his life in the former Dutch and British colony, he mentioned that Yellowstone is one of his favorite TV shows. And even more than the sumptuous landscape of the American West and the regional intrigue that dramatizes the collision of interests of a longtime ranching family, developers, politicians, Native Americans, and a bunkhouse full of colorful buckaroos, it’s the horse culture that captures Arran’s eye.

The twenty-three-year-old South African spent his first ten years in the urban environment of Cape Town, population 4.6 million-plus. “My family moved to a horse and cattle farm about twelve years ago,” he says. “Over the years I grew to know horses and their nature…. Slowly, over time I became a better rider through cattle herding and endurance riding. Then about four and a half years ago I saw some very interesting tack and bridle styles on Instagram.”

Living in South Africa, he continues, “it’s difficult to buy things from overseas, so I was inspired to make my own. I’ve always had a keen interest in making things with my hands, and after making my first bridle I realized there’s a market for this style of tack. So, I set about to create that for people.”

Arran says he learned leatherwork through trial and error, taking up the artform about the same time as his dad. “My whole family is creative. My mom spins her own wool from our sheep and does a lot of weaving. She also runs an outreach program called Hopeknitters. And my sister is a photographer; her business is Paigewoodphotography. My father studied fashion design and worked in that field for some time, then moved into designing buildings instead of clothes. He is also a skilled carpenter and does his own leatherwork, although it’s very different from my own. He makes and sells gun holsters and belts under the brand Arctic Wolf Gear. He taught me some leatherwork techniques, but we sort of picked up the trade at the same time and learned together.”

Arran reports that leatherworking tools are difficult to find in South Africa and expensive when you do find them. “There are a couple shops in the major cities and one or two good online stores. But I’m careful to maintain my equipment, keep my tools sharpened and oil them well, so they last a long time. In terms of the leatherworking craft in my country, I think there is a massive lack of skilled professionals who genuinely care about their work. You can find plenty of leather products, but there doesn’t seem to be much skill in the works. We suffer from a very large amount of unskilled labor, and we lack the professionals to teach these skills and hand them on. But at the same time, you’ll find some small businesses doing incredible work with leather. Our handcrafted leather shoe businesses are especially strong.”

by Nikki Alvin-Smith for Horizon Structures

The minefield of decisions to be made for new horse housing and pasture set-ups can be difficult to navigate, especially if the move is to a new farm a significant distance away or one in a different climate.

Moving horse and home can be a challenging event even for the best organized horse property owner. The decision to relocate can present many challlenges that have to be addressed to facilitate the move successfully. Problems such as timeline management for vacating a ‘Sold’ property and closing on the new one, readiness of the new site for horse occupation and renovations or modificationss required to provide adequate housing for the incoming equine residents.

Regional and local moving companies will take care of all the ‘stuff’ associated with our households. But the acquisition of a new horse farm, especially one ready for development where horses will need to be stabled or sheltered pending construction of a barn requires some savvy planning.

The Zero Turn Horse Farm

If you are doing a 180 degree turn and migrating from boarding your horse(s) to development of a parcel of land that may include a home but has little to offer in the way of barns or storage structures then closing on the property will be just the beginning of a long and arduous journey toward making your horse farm dream a reality that you can sit back and enjoy from the saddle.

Even if you are blessed with unlimited funds and can employ experienced construction crews to build your new barn, there will be many decisions to be made. Try to choose a company that has experience and talented craftsman not just to build the structure, but also to work with you in a positive ‘old-fashioned’ customer service manner throughout the process.

More likely budget constraints will demand some entrepreneurial and enterprising ideas and adjustments to the final development plan. Often, as you live with a property, you find even the best laid plans change as you develop a sense of the perspective of living in the new environment and appreciate the diversity of the land you have acquired.

Have Barn Will Travel

A simple ‘starter’ shelter that is budget-friendly will be a simple run-in shed within a well-fenced paddock. If the run-in shed is modular in design, planning permission for its siting may not even be required as long as zoning set back distances are honored.

Prefabricated run-in sheds offer another significant advantage: mobility. Large metal tow hooks installed at the corners of the structure facilitate hauling the building from Point A to Point B utilizing a pick-up, tractor or UTV.

by Liisa Andreassen

When the colts she was riding started breaking her stuff, Dee Dee McGraw took matters into her own hands. She knew that making her own repairs would save her money, but what she didn’t know was that it would eventually lead to a full-time gig. She started out doing patch and repair work, and her mom quickly recognized how much she enjoyed it and offered to buy her a whole hide. That was just the beginning. Not too long after, Dee Dee stopped into Tandy Leather in Montgomery, Alabama, to buy some fancier tools and reference books and it just snowballed from there.

She became a frequent flier at Tandy and, as luck would have it, met a manager named Chance.

“Chance really moved me into carving and the art end of the craft,” she says. “Until then, I didn’t know that I should rub my edges or go over my bevel marks with modeling spoons. He really helped me to take my game to the next level.”

In 2008, Dee Dee decided it was time to quit her job. She was traveling a lot and wanted to be closer to home. It took a while for the business, DND Leather, to turn into full-time work, so she continued to give some riding lessons to supplement the income.

Today, her favorite thing to do is tooling. Drawing? Not so much. She admits that drawing was taking much more time than it should until Britt Nantz, a well-known tooling artist, came along to give her some tips.

“He put me over the tipping point,” she says. “And once I learned more about how to draw, the production got so much faster. It used to take me anywhere from four to 16 hours to just draw out a new belt design. It should take about 30 minutes. You just can’t make money doing that. Now, it takes me about five hours to complete the whole belt job – start to finish (with no dye or super fancy tooling).”