Holli Hammarquist / HH Equine Dreams

02/03/2025

Nice explanations

01/29/2025

Good simple explanation

01/29/2025

01/29/2025

01/27/2025

Please Click on the brief SURVEY link and complete the survey!
https://forms.gle/pxNXgDGisSNNR58JA

I was 29 when I scraped together enough money for a down payment on my first farm. The horse and barn were run down, pastures were overgrown, and the fencing was a joke. The mortgage required that I have insurance on the house and even that was a burden. Insurance is expensive and getting more so. If you don't have it, you are self insured, meaning anything that goes wrong, you pay.

My journey from buying my first farm to having a complete facility caused me to think now about how I might help people like me who are coming up and growing their horse life dream. I thought about how local shows are dying out because of insurance costs. I remember buying a new tractor and worrying that if it got destroyed, the payments would keep coming. I was super careful how I stacked my hay so I wouldn't have a barn fire and was I careful where I parked my tractor and horse trailer so a tree wouldn't fall on them in a storm.

A few months ago, I wrote a post about horse related insurance concerns and one of my readers, Cat, contacted me to tell me her husband was in the insurance business. It turned out he is a lot more than a local insurance salesman. He is a global expert with a team that creates big solutions. For the last several months I have been working with this team to find a way to make insurance for what we do and what we have with our horses more affordable.

These insurance experts have come up with an insurance program where we all, in a way, share these risks together by purchasing our individual insurance coverages from a program that as the group grows, our costs would be reduced. This program wouldn't be a huge insurance company that has to pay their stockholders dividends. It would be a lean and mean program that over time could create meaningful savings.

We are at a point now where we need to understand what everybody sees as their risks and what insurance they need to cover those risks. I am putting up a link to a survey below and I hope you all will complete it. It's not long. It asks about individual and business needs related to horses, horse properties, horse farm equipment and insurance for horse illness and accident vet costs.

We need thousands of horse people to complete this survey to get a proper reading of our collective needs. Please complete the survey and be sure to share the survey post on your page so we can reach other horse people. This survey, and the potential group insurance program that I hope will come out of it, will be the horse community doing something together to help make having a horse more affordable. Let's do this together.

https://forms.gle/pxNXgDGisSNNR58JA

01/27/2025

01/26/2025

Really starting to love this guy!

01/26/2025

Here is what amateurs do not get, here is one of the best in the world taking lessons. There is ALWAYS something to improve upon.

01/25/2025

Cool!

How cool was this!?!

The Prometopidion is a bronze piece of armor that protected a horse's forehead. Decoration of warrior in chalcidian helmet with ram's head cheek pieces is symbolic of armor's power to protect its wearer, together with the apotropaic gorgon
~from Magna Graecia-ca. 480 BC
Artifact
Illustration by Rome: Res publica Romana on VK

01/25/2025

The image is of the actual barn where the program I have been writing about was. That is me on the right. The boys had to wear bright yellow shirts when we rode out so they could be easily seen from a distance. The site was 43 acres and once in a while a kid felt full of himself and took off. Most of the time they fell off when they did that, but sometimes I had to catch them on horseback. The room image is accurate and sad. The food was awful but the kids we had in the program made real progress.

I want to explain why there are so few equine therapy programs in mental health facilities like the one I have been writing about. The mental health system is based on a short term business model, not on a healing model. My program in a locked facility for boys addressed the most challenging cases including extremely violent boys, clinically depressed and incredibly abused boys and it was very effective. In some cases, boys who were predicted to age out at 18 and be moved to an adult locked facility, transitioned to lower security residences or outpatient programs after returning home.

So why are these kinds of programs so hard to find? Each time a boy was healed to the degree that he could leave, it generated a vacancy. The payment or reimbursement model for residential treatment is based on occupied beds per day. Success with a resident creates a loss for a facility by creating vacant beds that must be filled and that takes time, sometimes weeks or months of losses.

In the big picture, successfully getting a patient out of the high cost residential setting to an outpatient setting saves a lot of money, but the payment model is not big picture. It is based on day to day payments to facilities. Keeping a resident in a facility as long as possible is incentivized by this payment system. A rational system would pay facilities not to keep patients as long as possible, but rather to move patients out to a less costly treatment program as soon as possible.

The facility Administrator and I fought constantly over money. The program had the most challenging boys in the facility. Those boys were considered guaranteed long term, uninterrupted bed fillers whose payments could be counted on for years. But we were successful at moving them on. In a healing model, or a big picture payment model, our program saved money and reduced the pain these kids suffered.

Keeping horses is not cheap, but it saves money for the mental health system over the long term and it helps children. Our success with kids and horses was not valued simply because we emptied beds, which cost the facility money.


Our program was powerful but eventually I had to leave. While the support from the clinical staff kept me going, the constant opposition from the administration wore me down. I heard that two weeks after I left, the Clinical Director resigned.

Other recent posts about the program -

www.facebook.com/BobWoodHorsesForLife/posts/pfbid025xiqNfYo8NZ8hTFgj3t8h6DPbRisiuQwfUC9KYSVvzLizPM7QntkeGWpChZVec1ml

www.facebook.com/BobWoodHorsesForLife/posts/pfbid0ErCFgUoCTwpVvBwuN3TtH2kXFR97nG87hntmzH9Qu7vXRZo3nZBVyQmPvEgWNH8Bl