Follow The Bouncing Hunt Cap: How Hard Can It Be To Buy A Farm?

No, we're not talking about a grassy plot eight feet long by four feet wide by six feet deep at Greenlawn Memorial Permanent Resting Sites, Inc. Those are relatively easy to buy; a guy named Phil calls your home once a year (four times a year if he knows you own horses) and offers to assist you with that little purchase. By the way, don't pay for a brand new coffin. Simply explain to Phil that you have a perfectly good tack trunk already painted in your colors. (But in your will, instruct your heirs to CLEAN OUT the tack trunk before you're laid to rest in its liniment-scented depths.)

But we digress. The topic is buying a horse farm. Buying a farm is difficult because the bankers who lend money don't understand why horses need so much room. Cars are even bigger than horses yet a car is content to stay neatly in its tidy garage space night after night. Even if you leave a car in the driveway overnight, with no supervision whatsoever and no hay, it stays right where you put it. So why, the banker wonders, lend a woman (who made a unique first impression by coming into the bank in mucking boots) oodles of money to buy land to shelter an animal that you can't eventually barbecue and is too stupid to stay where you park him? When you put it that way, I wonder myself.

When selling your horse farm, find a realtor specializing in farm properties. We tried to work with a lady who specialized in condominiums. When your realtor calls on her cell phone from three miles away and hisses, "I'm bringing some people over so quick!---hide the horses," you wind up with two Danish Warmbloods and a pony tastefully arranged in your foyer. We tossed table cloths over them and decorated with classy bric-a-brac. I'm just waiting or Better Homes & Gardens to do a feature on this new decorating/performance art concept.

I told my real estate lady what I wanted to spend on my horse farm. When she stopped laughing, she recommended that I come up with a few hundred thousand dollars more. When I stopped laughing and got out of the psychiatric observation ward, we decided that I'd be looking at fixer-uppers. Next to airports. With bad zoning karma and septic tanks installed during the Paleozoic Era.

Advice for evaluating real estate for horse farms: Do not purchase 30 square miles of grassland in Mexico for a song and THEN ask why it's called Fire Ant Acres. When lake front property turns out to be swamp bottom acreage, you can give back the money you borrowed for an equine hydrociser. Also, don't rent your sand arena to sunbathers, throw buckets of water at them, and shout "Surf's up!" The Baywatch-Surf-And-Turf-Dressage-Club idea rarely pans out. If the seller signs the papers and then exclaims "thank heaven! After living THERE, our trip to the Amityville Horror Theme Park in the Bermuda Triangle next month should be very relaxing," back out of the deal as fast as you can. Also, don't buy property next to a man who polishes the inside of his mailbox, waxes his driveway, and compulsively mows his lawn in a perfect diamond patterns. This kind of neighbor is not prepared for the bucolic sight of horses itching their fuzzy butts on gnawed-off fence posts.

Did the previous farm owner keep the facility in good repair? Or did he own exactly one antique light bulb which he unscrewed and carried along to the next aisle with him---20 dusty watts of portable illumination? (And when he sold you the farm, did you get custody of ye olde light bulb?)

The Full Disclosure Law means that your realtor is required to casually mention it if the last three farm tenants disappeared slowly into a sink hole in stall seven and are presumed dead.

Banks don't like to lend money to the financially-challenged. They do like lending funds to odd breeders of exotic animals (or should that be exotic breeders of odd animals?). Llamas? Great. Ostriches? Sure---how much do you need? Prairie dogs? Here's some money to throw down a prairie dog hole. Get in the game, horse people! When you apply for a loan for a Hanoverian breeding facility, your business prospectus should be titled, "The Import & Manufacture Of German Self-Propelled Fertilizer Extruders." Do you retrain race horses and sell them for the jumper ring? Try borrowing money for "The Recycling & Redistribution Of Decelerated Oxer Hoppers."

Your new farm will need a home inspection, which is like a pre-purchase exam. The exam should reassure you that: a) All the pieces that stand upright and support other pieces will probably still be standing upright six months from now. b) The plumbing works. c) Nothing is gushing radon gas. d) All handles and switches cause appropriate things to light up, turn, or shut off. Nothing should explode when you signal it to go.

Scientists have proven that all horse farms suffer a permanent imbalance in horses-to-stalls ratio. In English, this means that if you buy a farm with six stalls, you are destined to wind up with eight horses. You can try buying a barn with eight stalls, but you'll just end up with ten horses. You must purchase a farm with two stalls FEWER than the number of horses you actually own. Yes, you'll still have one horse living in your basement and another bunking in the indoor arena, but it's actually the smartest choice economically.

A suggestion for novice real estate purchasers: get one of those play-rugs that look like little horse farms. Lay it out between your bed and bathroom (in the future, you might get to use one, but not both, on any regular basis). Fill the little water jump with tapwater. Spread sand in the tiny arena. For authenticity, put sand in your shoes and scatter stray tractor parts across the itty bitty landscape. Hold the handle down on your john until it overflows---here comes Hurricane Harvey! Arrange your Breyer horses so that some of them are OUTside the pasture fence. Also, have the little imaginary vet's imaginary accountant send you an invoice for the little plastic horsie who is vacationing in the little plastic veterinary clinic. Now, once a month you have to send hundreds of dollars to a pudgy little doll we'll call The Cranky Banker Action Figure. He wants to spend your money (which is now HIS money) in the hot, tropical breezes of Pretend Cancun, so toss him into your clothes dryer on 'high.' Now hurry back to the farm, because one of your loose horses has gotten into the road and upset the invisible driver of a Matchbox car, who is filing a nasty little invisible lawsuit.

One more thing to remember when you call the real-life realtor: be sure to mention that you're willing to live in a hayloft-apartment half the size of the average box stall . . . but your imported warmblood has to have a stall with hand-hewn beams, a wide-screen TV and an ocean view.

Reprinted from Hunter & Sport Horse Magazine

Nov/Dec 1999 Issue

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