Factum Equine

03/01/2025

Five years since Jack moved to the farm 🥰 when I think of my plans for him vs. what he had in store for me, I’m overwhelmed with gratitude to the universe for bringing him into my life.

Humans all deserve to have a horse like Jack to love- to challenge their perspectives, demand they be their best selves, and to be so unapologetically authentic.

It’s so “crazy horse girl” of me, but I sincerely owe so much to this wonderful creature. Our journey has changed my whole life and is why our herd gets to live the way they do.

Happy five year gotcha day to my very best boy- I cant wait to see where the next five years take us 💜

02/26/2025

I’m proud to be weird if it means our herd is happy 🤷🏼‍♀️👀

02/24/2025

Yesterday, our clinics with Equestrian Confidence Coach Sarah Marshall were a big hit! Though we initially scheduled just one session, there was such interest that Sarah offered a double header. With over 20 attendees, there was great introspection and thoughtful conversation around reframing thought traps to encourage positive self talk and progress effectively with our horses.

As someone whose anxiety extends well beyond work with horses 🙃, I look forward to finding opportunities to apply this work across my life. I’m also grateful to have a common language within our community- boarders spent over an hour chatting about it after Sarah wrapped up, which was lovely to see.

Thank you Sarah Marshall for creating an environment where it was safe to be authentic, open, and reflective! Proud of our little community for doing the hard work to be our horses best human 💜

02/24/2025

Join me in wishing Mariposa the happiest 17th birthday 🥳🥳🥳

To celebrate her special day, Mari was showered with carrots and groomies and romping in the snow with her person. She’s such a joyous, smart, special horse and it’s my sincere pleasure to care for her.

Happy birthday sweet girl 💕

02/22/2025

Hay is life 🤩🙃

Nine out of our ten horses are on full forage diets, baled hay being a dietary staple for eight of the nine. Each horse has a slow feeder to match their individual needs and all bales fed out are documented so I can track how many each horse consumes per month. This way, if someone starts to look pudgy or under conditioned I can adjust the size of the slow feeder holes accordingly. Maverick, our hardest keeper, eats an average of 18 bales of second cut per month with a large hole slow feeder (like 7 inches) and Lily, who is still adjusting to 24/7 access to hay ate 13 bales of first cut last month with a 2.5 inch hole slow feeder.

Any guesses who eats the most and least of our herd?

02/17/2025

Today is the sort of day where I could’ve allowed myself to be miserable. It’s windy, there’s branches down everywhere, and the ice is truly prolific. Everything is 10x harder to do because you can’t just walk places without fearing for your life, your face hurts, and you can’t maneuver around freely on account of 1937 layers of clothing. Can you feel me?!

Even on days like today- perhaps most importantly on days like today- I’ve been working on identifying small things to celebrate in everyday life to help turn the tide of pervasive winter blues… to find the glimmers of happenstance joy and sincere contentment even if for a fleeting moment.

First, Winnie here reminded me of the simple pleasure of a good snack. Then, Stormy playing enthusiastically with a branch reminded me about creating my own fun. Maverick was happy to be blanketed (which basically never happens) and I relished in my gratitude for horses who feel safe enough to express their opinions. Then sweet Lily basically threw herself to the ground to roll the second she was unblanketed… and instead of my usual mental checklist and spiraling I just watched her enjoy herself for a moment. Then I noticed just watching her and not spiraling and I appreciated the progress I’ve made being more present and grounded.

Four glimmers in around an hour. Four mindful moments- They’re much easier to notice when you look 👀



📸: Krista Marie 🥰

02/16/2025

Check on your horse friends, people… this weather has been no joke!

Our farm is pretty well drained and we are lucky that the property owner has large machinery for plowing, but regardless we had 1.5 inches thick of ice on this circular area of our bottom paddocks yesterday. Lisa and I smashed ice for a decent amount of time to make this path, and today it’s a literal river 🙃

I feel bad for our new boarders who have not seen the absolute beauty of our space, but they are being real troopers! I’m not sure how many more times I can say “I promise it’s really nice here from April-November” 🤪

For the love of horses, especially on days like today.

02/15/2025

Lisa and I gave Ms. Mariposa a good grooming since her human has been sick. She LOVED the extra attention and scratchers since she’s starting to shed quite a bit. One of the great things about doing daily living tasks at liberty is that there are very clear boundaries and obvious consent to engage. Mari stood perfectly still, pointing at different areas with her nose for over 30 minutes. She had many releases, many nose tingles, and some mutual grooming 💜 Then when she decided she was done, she walked off and we moved on to “real” work.

A cold and icy day can certainly be turned around with the right company 💕

02/14/2025

💜💕“If I asked you to name all the things you love, I wonder how long it would take to name yourself” 💜💕

On this day to celebrate love, regardless of your feelings around the commercialization of holidays or whether you share your life with a romantic partner, I hope you take some time to appreciate and care for yourself. Sometimes we feel selfish or over-confident expressing self love- but as queen mother says “if you can’t love yourself, how the hell are you going to love someone else?”

Happy Valentines Day, friends. You deserve to love yourself 💕

02/13/2025

Even on grey and dreary days, this dude always brings joy and smiles 🥰 also, he is very hard to photograph because he wants to be on top of you/the camera 🤣

02/12/2025

Yesterday with the help of volunteer John, we did a deep clean of the barn. John did a tremendous amount of dusting while I started a project to repaint the metal stall guards. In my usual fashion, I thought we’d finish sanding all the green paint and rust off the stalls in one morning 🤪 instead, barely one stall got done in 2.5 hours. Thankfully John’s work left the barn feeling really clean, otherwise I would’ve felt defeated by the minimal observable difference.

What farm projects turned out to be way harder/more time consuming than you originally planned?? My goal for this projects completion went from “Tuesday morning” to sometime this month 🤣

02/02/2025

What the dinner wagon looks like when feeding full forage to a herd of 10 🤩 in this gator we have the following forage types:

-baled first and second cut to go into our slow feeder boxes
- loose first cut as a snack for a lucky herd member
- a flake of alfalfa because Jack glares at me if I don’t give it to him (he started on it for gut benefits when we were healing ulcers)
- chopped hay for a herd member with heaves who can’t have baled hay
- soaked alfalfa pellets in all the buckets as supplement carriers for “dinner”

I’m so pleased with this variety of forage offerings, coupled with how simple the process of feeding is. A lot of people feed grain because it feels easier- loading this up and feeding out took a total of 30 minutes. 3 minutes per horse 🤯

If you want to learn more about full forage or forage first diets, reach out to join our May clinic on how to start! The first 3 people to register get their current diets used as demo transition diets 🥳

01/31/2025

We had a special visitor today- Mr. Maestro from the big barn 🥰 Maestro is a young whose human is super dedicated to creating a solid foundation for him before getting into a busy riding career. Like many ottbs, Maestro had pretty prolific ulcers coming off the track. He’s scoped clear, transitioned to a diet, and is feeling (and looking) good! Now that he’s on the mend, he and his human have been lessoning with Deborah Murphy and making great progress. He walks around the property like a pro, interested in all the sights and sounds. He particularly enjoys visiting our herd, and I of course welcome any ottb who wants to snuggle.

01/27/2025

I spend a lot of time listening to podcasts, and this is one of the coolest episodes I’ve heard in a long time…all despite the fact that neonatal/foal development is basically completely irrelevant to me or my work. Dr. Madigan (who invented the Madigan Squeeze) speaks about evolutionary biology and the neuro-developmental impact of deviating from historical birthing methods on foals and humans. Boy, my mind is spinning with curiosity! So cool 🤯

Podcast Episode · The Journey On Podcast · 01/24/2025 · 1h 54m

01/26/2025

I’ve been thinking a lot about the expectations we put on ourselves and our horses and how that impacts our and their joy.

There are different levels to expectations, and it can take some time to “untrain” ourselves from what we “should” be doing. But the hardest step for me wasn’t removing the expectation of physical work, it was awareness of the emotional expectations I placed on the horses around me. For example, when I first began to consider this I’d think things like “I’m not asking you to do anything with your body, so I’m not making any real demands”.

But then when I wasn’t asking for anything physically I was still somehow disappointed when my horse wouldn’t come to me, or when they turned their head away when I tried to pat them, or when they didn’t want me to sit with them while they slept. I remember feeling like such a failure because I wasn’t even succeeding at doing nothing 🤪 but, it wasn’t because it was nothing… it was because it was something that looked like nothing. It was something that forced me to be honest with myself about why I wanted to be around horses. After some intense introspection, I found (among other things) that I emotionally needed the validation of their engagement with me, and through some work with Nicole Birkholzer - Mindful Connections, I began to consider that demand the same way I considered trotting a 20 meter circle to be one.

We have a lot of these emotional expectations for our horses- we don’t want them to “act up” because somehow that’s a judgement on our equestrian skills… we want them to snuggle us for cute pictures so people can comment on how strong our connection is… we say we want them to express themselves, until they do and that’s inconvenient and time consuming for us.

So, next time you go hang out with your horse, I implore you lovely people to think about what need it’s meeting IN YOU for them to comply with your requests. Next, consider deeply by asking “why” of yourself until you get to the root cause. And then, instead of placing this emotional expectation on them, go hang out with them and just be curious about watching. See what you can learn about them with no agenda. Do they stand a certain way? Do they breathe deeply? where does breath move their belly? What is the smallest twitch of their nose that you can notice? How do their ears move when they hear something in the distance? And then notice how it feels in your body to take note of all these nearly imperceptible micro communications. Your horse will undoubtedly notice you noticing them and WITHOUT AGENDA your connection will grow.



If you’re interested to learn more about Mindful Connections with horses, sign up for our clinic with Nicole Birkholzer on Friday April 25th from 930-1230pm.

01/24/2025

🌟**update** evaluating equine biomechanics is also full 🌟

Our clinic with Equestrian Confidence Coach on February 23rd is officially FULL 🥳 if you’d like to be added to the waitlist, reach out.

Next up, we have VERY LIMITED spaces left for a lecture and applied demo on Evaluating Equine Biomechanics with Equitouch Bodywork & Rehab, LLC on Sunday March 30th from 1030-1pm. $40pp

Then, on Friday April 25th we are thrilled to be hosting Nicole Birkholzer - Mindful Connections for a lecture/demo from 930-1230pm. Nicole is absolutely central to my perspectives on how horses should be considered in our care of and work with them. Our place of peace would not be what it is without her guidance and compassion and I’m so pleased to have her out. $50pp.

Reach out via messenger, text to 860-941-9780, or email [email protected] to sign up 💚

📸 : Salamander Studios

01/23/2025

Thirty degrees feels like summer when it’s been so cold. A couple of the horses who’ve been heavily blanketed the last few days got to enjoy a nakey break in the sunshine today. Not to anthropomorphize, but I liken these nakey breaks to taking your bra off at the end of the day 🤣

01/23/2025

Whelp, started the day crying 🖤