Growing the business

In the last blog, I talked a bit about the formation of Rising Star Farm.  In this blog, I'm going to talk a little bit about the growth and expansion of the farm.  Over the past few years, I've worked to develop a broodmare band that reflected our breeding goals - upper level horses in the Olympic disciplines, as well as hunters.  To that end, I've been lucky enough to find some wonderful performance mares who were ready for a career change!   So now I turned my attention to finding new stallions to grow the program and provide desirable bloodlines that are  not so readily available in the US.

So, we went to Belgium to go shopping!  On March 3rd, my husband Steve and I flew to Brussels with two goals - the first was to visit our dear friends in Paris and the second, was to find at least one stallion prospect to bring home to the farm.  We managed to achieve both goals (and then some).  After a great long weekend with our friends in Paris, Steve and I took the train from Paris to Brussels and prepared for several intensive days of horse shopping, accompanied by our trainer - Jennifer Ramsey.  We could not have done any of this without the support and guidance of the Studbook sBs (the Belgian Sporthorse registery).  I had a plan to find a son of Nabab de Reve to bring home, so we looked at several young offspring of this stallion.  I didn't want to limit my options, so we asked the breeders we visited, to show us any young colt who had the bloodlines and abilities for International level performance in the jumpers.  

As you might expect, looking for talented jumpers in Belgium was easy!  We found three perfect stallion prospects and unexpectedly also found a broodmare.  The first colt that we picked is a son of the great stallion Chin Chin.  He is out of a Carthago mother and Major de la Cour is the third stallion of note in his pedigree.  Diabolo d'Esquelmes is a beautiful bay colt with great movement too.  The second colt that we picked is a direct son of Cassini I out of an Acorado daughter.  Corleone is also in the pedigree.  This Holsteiner is also very attractive and looks to be quite a nice hunter type.  Lastly, we chose a playful chestnut son of Quaprice/Quincy (Quidam de Revel) who's mother is by Dollar de la Pierre (also Quidam de Revel) who is the sire of Rodrigo Pessoa's WEG horse HH Rebozo.  Cumano rounds out this pedigree.  We didn't see the colt (Jus d'O) jump until we received video on our return to the US, but once we saw that video, the decision was easy to make. 

Cachinka (Radco d'Houtveld/Chin Chin/Carthago) was an unexpected bonus.  One of the breeders that we worked with convinced us to include this uber talented mare.  And, since I had gone to Belgium looking to add Nabab de Reve bloodlines to my program, we decided to breed the mare to Nabab before she comes to the US - fingers crossed for a successful pregnancy!

I feel like my breeding program has grown significantly with the addition of these wondeful  bloodlines and the next few years will be spent getting the young stallions approved with breeding registries and testing out their talent in the performance arena.  Both Jennifer and  I have our work cut out for us!