I just got caught up on our year-to-date horse expense list and chart. 2007 is shaping up to be more expensive for us as horse owners. It looks like the biggest reason for that is because we’re just coming off of the cold months and winter is definitely more expensive for maintaining horses. Last years expense list started in summer. Now that the grass is growing and our horses are spending less time in the barn, our expenses are going down. If it wasn’t for farrier expense in April, our monthly total would have been only $74. But horses (usually) need shoeing!

Here are some expense changes implemented recently:

• We find ourselves using more wood pellets these days, as it makes our job cleaning stalls each day much easier.
• We got some good deals on more expensive feed from Purina and now we’re hooked. We really like Omolene and Strategy. I think we’ll stick with Strategy for now, which sells for about $3 more per bag than local feed-store sweet oats. We’ll also be cutting back slightly on the amount of feed we use.
• We’ll start buying fly parasites again this month (May). We tried them last year and they worked. Today I noticed TONS of flies in the barn. We should have ordered the parasites a little earlier.

On an administrative note, the horse expense list page is looking cluttered to me so I’ll be redesigning it. The information is good, it’s just getting hard to read.

Here’s the updated graph:

Our 11 month average is $157.