So blogging is going really well, only seems to be happening once every six months these days! The yearling sales of 2019 seem like a distant memory but at least for Culworth Grounds they were a positive one. Colin the Cable Bay was the best result in terms of profit margin and story but the yearlings this year were consistent across the board. It’s that great combination of a bit of luck combined with lots of hard work can pay off. It was a great result for the team and hopefully gives hope to other people who are starting off on a small scale with smaller budgets. It certainly gives me the hope to continue to try and repeat it!

On the talk of team we have some new members to welcome. Eva Filgate has joined us as Assistant Stud Groom from Darley. She will be assisting Kate Leatherbarrow in her new role as Stud Groom. Eva has a wealth of experience across the board having worked for Darley for nine years. Four of those years were spent in the foaling unit at Woodpark and the other five years were spent at Kildangan working with the mares, foals and yearlings.

Also joining us in Matthew Hobbs. Matthew has lived at Culworth Grounds before when it was a training facility and has been riding out and working for Michaels Attwater for the last 3 years. He will be a great help with doing some of the faster work when we have our racehorses on holiday.

The breeding season has arrived again and the first foals have hit the ground. As ever my decision making when it comes to choosing stallions is taking time. The lower down the budget tier you are the harder it is to decide. I have pages of excel spreadsheets comparing stallions by stakes horses, winners, starters and sales prices. Then I have help looking at the matings on paper from Chris Bennett at Birdcatcher Bloodstock to try and get some good line breeding in place followed by analysing the speed figures of the potential foal. The list goes on. You can have all the best information on paper but then the market decides that for some other reason that they don’t like the stallion. Anyway, the inevitable will happen and I will have no choice but to decide. At the end of the day my main aim is to breed a racehorse and to try and minimise the percentage chance of making a loss.

The breeding game is not straightforward but last year I sent one of my mares to Night of Thunder. For once it was looking like I had made a good decision but breeding is a great leveller. The mare had an internal bleed in December and went downhill very quickly. One minute you are excited at the arrival of a new foal and the next you are standing in a field on a cold dark December day putting the mare to sleep and out of her misery. No matter how often you tell yourself that death is part of the journey of life with horses, it still doesn’t make it any easier.

It has been a good start to 2020 on the track for Culworth Grounds. King Of Arms got off the mark at Kempton and we are also looking forward to seeing the progress of Kipps who won at Lingfield. He was our first horse that we sold at Tattersalls Book 1 and looks to have plenty of potential for next year. I also think that a lot of our yearlings of 2019 were two year old types so hopefully they show what they can do on the track and bring us the success that is the most important of all, winners!