KD's Certified Horseshoeing

05/30/2026

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1D66KNHgYc/?mibextid=wwXIfr

Team Alfalfa 🌸 or Team Grass Hay 🌾?

Here's what SCIENCE actually says 👇

🔬 MYTH BUSTED: Alfalfa actually has
LOWER sugar & starch than most grass hays!

🔬 Grass hay is MORE dangerous for
laminitis-prone horses — not alfalfa!

🔬 BUT — too much alfalfa can cause excess
protein & skewed calcium ratios

The truth? MOST horses do best on a
MIX of both! 🐴

What do YOU feed? Drop it below! 👇

Sources: Mad Barn · NIH/PMC ·
Mobile Veterinary Services · Equi-Analytical Labs

05/04/2026

05/04/2026

I had great clients but that don’t complain and most give hefty tips but I have seen these ISO posts.
You really do get what you pay for.

"ISO farrier who doesn't charge an arm and a leg"

This essay will be a compilation of thoughts that have been swirling around for awhile..... in which I'll attempt basic math with loose interpretation of some numbers. If you're going to be a nerd about my numbers, you're missing the point.

First, being a farrier is a niche skill in high demand. The United States has the largest horse population in the world with 6-10 million horses. With only 28,000 farriers estimated by the American Farriers Journal, every farrier should have 285 or more horses on their schedule to ensure all horses have hoof care (assuming an average of 8 million horses).

285 horses = 71 horses/week, 10 horses a day, 7 days a week.
Don't want to work every day with no break, forever and ever?
Then it's 15 horses a day, 5 days a week.

Some farriers can handle that workload. I personally cannot.
Assuming all your clients live 0 minutes away from you, everyone stands well, horses are ready for you, and you have no shenanigans, you're looking at 5 - 7 hours/day for barefoot trims on 15 horses. That's the most unrealistic math I've ever done 😂.

If you're doing half sets, full sets, or glue ons, I'm not sure many farriers could/should do 15 of those a day. And you're looking at a 15 hour day minimum without any travel time or interruptions.

Farriers come to you, so add in realistic travel time and their hours spent working get longer, with less horses they can get to in daylight.

Second, you want a GOOD farrier. General standards would be: shows up, communicates, is reasonably skilled and knowledgeable at the craft, is friendly to you and your horse. Rates will vary. You can have fast, good, and cheap but never all three at the same time.

Out of those 28,000 farriers, not all of them are good.

Third, some of you have never run your own business so you don't understand what happens behind the scenes.

When you go buy a new car and you don't like the price, you shop around or negotiate with the sales person. But you know the salesperson ultimately isn't in charge or control of the market rate. When you go grocery shopping and prices have gone up, you may put something back on the shelf, but you don't yell at the cashier on your way out. They have nothing to do with rising costs.

But those are big corporations. Your farrier is a small business. You're looking at the person who sets their rates. When you say things like "I can't believe what I'm being charged for shoes these days...." you're saying you don't think your farrier should be able to pay their bills and run a successful business. You won't find the email address of the Toyota CFO and write them a strongly worded letter about the price of your new car. But you will fuss and complain about your farrier bill to their face or behind their back.

Make that make sense....

There is a difference between saying "that's not in my budget right now" and "I can't believe you charge an arm and a leg for nailing on some shoes."

I don't personally know a single farrier who is overcharging for their business model. Whether they are talented at their craft is up to you to decide. But farriery is a career. Our business must be profitable for it to be sustainable.

Fourth, hoof care is essential and every horse needs it on a regular basis. So we're back to the original dilemma - millions of horses and not enough (good) farriers.

Solutions?
Farriers: insist on safe working conditions, charge whatever you need to, and take care of yourself so you can go the distance.
Owners: get your horses trained to stand better, don't have more horses than you can afford, and consider yourself lucky (considering the aforementioned math) if you have a good farrier.

If you made it this far - the image I chose is of my new composite toe boots to protect my injured foot. Fitting, I think.

PS - if this comes across as unsympathetic to owners....I can see why. Owning horses is becoming more and more expensive, prohibitively so for many people. But that isn't due to farrier prices.

PPS - if you think my little Grinch heart has shrunk too small, don't worry. I'm still kissing pony noses and loving our equine friends. Perhaps this is just the beginning of my seasonal depression 🙃 summer is almost here.......🐎

04/24/2026

Noticing a few cases of pink soles lately—three horses just this past week.

What’s interesting is that they all have otherwise strong, functional feet. This points away from external causes (like stony ground) and more toward internal stress. The bruising is spread beneath P3, suggesting inflammation in the sole corium.

With average sole depth, what we see now likely started around 3 months ago—taking us back to January.

For these horses, that coincides with winter worming, which can place added strain on the system.

If you have horses that are more sensitive—EMS, PPID, or laminitis-prone—be mindful of how and when you schedule wormers, vaccinations, and similar treatments. Try to avoid overloading their systems.

Supporting liver function with a quality supplement may also help reduce the impact.

02/13/2026

🫣

02/11/2026

Quick anatomy lesson that could change how you feed your horse:

Horses don't have a gallbladder.

In species that do — humans, dogs, cats — the gallbladder stores bile and releases it in concentrated bursts to emulsify dietary fat. Big meal with a lot of fat? Big release of bile.

Horses secrete bile continuously from the liver in small, steady amounts. There's no storage. No burst capacity. Just a slow, constant trickle.

So when we dump a cup of oil on a horse's feed, we're asking a system designed for slow, steady fat processing to handle a concentrated amount it was never built for.

The horse's evolutionary fat source? Seeds and the lipids naturally present in forages. Small amounts, consumed gradually over hours of grazing.

This is why I recommend whole food fat sources — h**p hearts, chia seeds, stabilized ground flax — over isolated oils. You're working with the biology instead of against it.

The horse already told us how it wants to eat. We just have to listen.

02/10/2026

Everything she said! Read it. Absorb it. Apply it.

01/20/2026

Or trimmed….things something that’s coming up more and more. Farriers nowadays aren’t a farrier as their sole income. They’re taking on other work. It’s impacting their work. Even the ones who aren’t taking on another job.
I can’t count how many times I’ve had clients mention that when they had prior farriers who they did a great job at first. Kind,patient,did great work. After they had been a client for a couple years,all of a sudden they’re getting aggressive and hostile with their horses and the quality of their work starts going downhill
It’s great reminder for all of us that no matter how good of a reputation we’ve had that we really are only as good as the last shoe or trim job we completed.
We need to stay humble,keep our work ethic intact and realize a reputation can be ruined and we need to maintain it no matter how stellar it was in the past. As we are facing brutally cold temps to work in we need to keep tat mind set at the forefront even more so.
Cold,harsh weather isn’t an excuse to do poor work. Clients are understanding. Find ways to stay warm thru your jobs. It’s your responsibility to figure out how to stay warm while working. If it’s unbearable re-schedule for another day but do NOT cut corners.
PRO Tip: the harder you work the warmer you are. In fact if you keep moving you’ll probably be sweating not cold.

01/08/2026

A recent comment from Haydn Morsa that we wanted to share:

“I feel as though I went through a similar pattern as you. I never forged, but I had competition horses shod in steel. In fact even if my horses had good feet all through their younger years of training, when it came time to run them we just… shod them. It was the thing to do. Normal.

In 2022 I started picking up a rasp to work on one of my young horses who had severe high low. I was touching her up between trims of my farrier to try and keep her balanced. Slowly but surely I started trimming more and more of my young horses, getting educated and comfortable with trimming, until I finally pulled all the shoes on the rest and added them to my schedule as well.

I did the same thing you did at first… leave as much heel as possible and take the toe down as much as you can. Give them a strong mustang roll, leave the frog (because they need the “callous”) and don’t trim the bars level with the sole because they are an extension of the wall and the wall is there for support, acting as a natural “shoe”. So maybe it is a bit different from the way you were first doing it, but I relate hard.

I eventually had horses plateau in their rehab. I think if I had looked closer and documented more I would’ve seen the failures of the grid and hairline. But they would get to a certain point and not improve any more. That’s when I started to feel defeated, like I needed to go back to shoes.

I did learn to glue on composite shoes and I think that they can be a great tool in the rehab box for bad cases. But at that point in time it was another crutch for me to fall back on, just one that made me feel better about myself. The concussion is lessened in a flexible shoe, the hoof can expand and contract, and I’m not nailing through the wall. But it still wasn’t the answer.

I’ve been following you for nearly as long as I’ve been trimming horses. I always liked what you said but I let other people convince me that you were “too far out there” and I had to take what you said with a grain of salt. They picked apart your drawings, your lack of radiographs, and more. But I stayed following you, because I knew you were on to something huge. I just wasn’t ready to accept it.

When I really started digging through your page and found your online albums showing rehab after rehab, it clicked for me. You were getting results no matter the breed, age, pathology, or diet. I listened closer to you explaining how the trim isn’t about following a method, it’s about shaping the outside of the foot to the inside of the foot, and keeping a wear/growth equilibrium. It’s the way hooves were designed by nature to be! Even if in the wild it doesn’t always work out that way, that IS the design.

I just recently starting following everything you preach to a T. And I’m documenting. I’m very excited to see the changes in my horses and bring what you do into the performance horse industry, specifically barrel racing.

I want people to see that ALL horses can have good feet. Most people think we have “bred the good feet out of them” but I think more than ANYTHING it’s our husbandry practices that have driven the nails into the coffin of the equine foot. No pun intended.”

Thank you for sharing your story, Haydn 😊

There are now 60+ Hoof Building Case Studies (David’s albums) available to view (free of charge) on our website. You can find the link in the comments here, or put “Hoof Building Case Studies” into your search engine.