Best Practices Helping Keep Breeding Sheds Open

The Kentucky Department of Agriculture issued guidelines March 25 to all equine facilities that clarify the impact of Gov. Andy Beshear's call for all non-essential business to close as of 8 p.m. Thursday, March 26, in order to further contain the spread of COVID-19.

Breeding sheds will not be forced to close but the State Veterinarian Dr. Bob Stout's office did distribute a list of best practices to minimize the risk of infection of farm staff. These same guidelines were also circulated by The Jockey Club.

All boarding operations, however, are included in the shutdown with their activities limited to horse care only.

"If a facility has clients that engage in self-care for their horses these individuals are allowed to come to the facility for horse care activities only," read a statement from the Department of Agriculture. "Moving forward, the facility owner or manager should take control of developing a schedule in which clients are assigned a time to visit the facility to care for their horse(s). This will minimize the number of individuals at the facility at any given time. If a client has a horse on full or partial care (whose needs are being met by staff), those individuals are asked to refrain from visiting the facility. In addition, if it is possible to decrease the amount of staff at a facility, in order to minimize the number of individuals coming and going, an employer is asked to do so."

In its release, The Jockey Club urged all North American, Central American, and Caribbean Thoroughbred stud farm operations, at a minimum, to follow guidelines from the Kentucky Department of Agriculture on reducing the risk of COVID-19 infection.

Many of the Central Kentucky stallion farms contacted said most of the best practices being recommended are already standard operation procedure.

"When you are dealing with outbreaks, everything is smooth until you get your first positive and then how you respond to it relates to how badly you get affected," said Garrett O'Rourke, manager of Juddmonte Farms. "Over the years we have had outbreaks with foal diarrheas and rotavirus and clostridium. We have herpes virus issues we've had to deal with from horses coming back from racetracks when there are issues and you have to isolate them. Everyone here is very trained on isolation and biosecurity issues. I feel like it is an advantage for us. You can explain it to office people but until you make the mistakes and see the adverse effects of those mistakes you don't realize the seriousness of it being all the time."

To address the threat of COVID-19 specifically, O'Rourke said Juddmonte has implemented a plan that requires all farm personnel to document daily the people they have been in contact with, and it has compartmentalized operations throughout the farm to keep certain areas separate from one another. All deliveries from off the farm are dropped off in one location and farm personnel don't interact with people handling the deliveries.

"We have a plan in place and if it gets more serious, we have a plan to get more serious ourselves and basically shutdown operations," O'Rourke said. "We can turn out the horses that can be turned out. Training horses still need to be trained, but we can lessen the workload so we don't have as much interaction. We are all crossing fingers."

Michael Banahan, director of farm operations for Darley America, said the biggest change for Darley has been getting electronically all documents related to breeding a mare and also limiting the people who can be in the breeding shed. Attendants from outside farms must stay in the parking lot or stay in their truck while the mare is bred.

"Actually handling all the documents electronically does quicken it up a bit. It allows you to deal any issues before the mare gets to the shed, so you're ahead of the curve," Banahan said. "Most of what we were doing before was electronic but I think more farms will do things this way once this is behind us. I guess that's one positive step."

Farms have not reported any drop in the traffic of mares to the breeding sheds, noting that the number of mares being scheduled is in line with what would be expected at this time of year.

Bananhan noted the priority this year of "keeping the sheds open" depends solely on "everyone being on the same page and following the guidelines."

The guidelines for breeding operations from the Kentucky Department of Agriculture are as follows: 

Breeding shed activity: With vans and individuals visiting multiple facilities each day we do recommend adopting standard practices in how we manage people and horses visiting sheds.

1. Submission of documentation for mares booked to be bred would best be done electronically. We've seen numerous reports where handled paper can be contaminated.

2. Eliminate outside individuals (van drivers and mare attendants) from coming into the prep area and shed. To accomplish this, the van would arrive, the mare would be offloaded, and handed off to a shed employee (using the shed's shank) who would handle the mare through the process. The van driver and anyone accompanying the mare to the shed should remain outside in the parking area while maintaining social distance with other individuals.

3. After cover, the mare would be returned to the loading area and handed off to the attendant for loading onto the van. If there is need for a mare's attendant to witness the cover, this should be accomplished from outside—looking in, videotaped or virtually.

4. The shank would be cleaned before returning to the shed or reused and attendant would wash hands (recommended addition by The Jockey Club: or preferably disinfected with acceptable products efficacious in preventing the spread of viral or bacterial agents and the use of disposable gloves by attendants are recommended where practicable).

5. Breeding equipment (leg straps, collars, boots, etc.) would be cleaned before reuse (recommended addition by The Jockey Club: or preferably disinfected with acceptable products efficacious in preventing the spread of viral or bacterial agents and the use of disposable gloves by attendants are recommended where practicable).

6. Additionally, maintaining enhanced biosecurity in our daily activity is essential to all of these mitigations.

Implementing these practices, and any other action that can be taken to eliminate people from congregating in common areas will be beneficial and could be critical in the ability to continue transporting horses to and from sheds.