Weights and measures

The recently retired Steve Caddel talks about his life spent first with Quarter Horses in Texas and then thoroughbreds in Kentucky, where he became the sales and weighing man for Hallway Feeds and Kentucky Equine Research – over 30 years he has got to know more about the development of the state's young thoroughbreds than anyone. Dedicated to the improvement of equine nutritional knowledge and understanding, Caddel’s experience has led him to the firm belief that more is not necessarily better.

THE WORLD OF BIG DATA is taking the equine world forward in so many exciting ways – from analysing growth rates to ensure optimum development of the young horse to wearable tech allowing trainers to analyse exactly what is going on in when a horse gallops.

None of these developments could have happened without significant scientific input, but these advances are also due to the concerted efforts of horsemen and women who have put in the hard yards with a dedicated goal of developing a greater understanding of the thoroughbred’s physiology in order to improve their wellbeing and care, as well as finding the best ways to achieve competitive success.

One such individual is Steve Caddel, whose dedicated and concentrated work over the last 20 years in Lexington, Kentucky, has focused on monitoring and understanding equine growth. His work contributed significantly to the development of data records at the heart of Kentucky Equine Research’s (KER) equine growth tracking software, Gro-Trac®.

As we discussed in the autumn issues, this software application helps breeders and producers record the growth of a farm’s youngstock, and compares that development against a population benchmark.

The population standards have not been transmitted from a virtual data god in the cloud, but are the result of decades of weighing and measuring thoroughbreds, mostly carried out by KER, and particularly by the Texan-born and Kentucky resident, Caddel. The extensive thoroughbred growth database now includes over 50,000 individuals worldwide and over a million growth data points. It started in Kentucky, where nearly all of the data was collected by Caddel and his team as they travelled around the state’s stud farms with a mobile weighing machine with, at first, a record book in hand, but now armed with an iPad.

He has had close contact with more US-born thoroughbreds over the last 20 years than anyone, even the resident vets.

Caddel, who retired last year, has learnt plenty over the years and his knowledge is that of a true horseman; his longevity in the business allows him an understanding of the modern-day thoroughbred which few possess. “Every year I was getting to see a whole new crop of babies,” he reminisces, adding: “And every year I would never know when I’m going to put be putting my hands on the next champion.

“We weighed Curlin from the time he was born until he left to go to the yearling sale; I just love being in those barns in the morning.”

Caddel moved to Kentucky from Texas in the 1980s, but his 1950s upbringing in the drier and typically more arid state and his involvement with the local Quarter Horses was not lost on the horseman.

The breed now has become more divided and is specifically bred for differing purposes – racing, cutting and farm work – but, as Caddel was growing up, the horses were essentially multi-purpose – used daily on farms for cattle work, but also for enjoyment, too – at the weekends the cowboys would ride their horses into the town to the rodeo or for match races.

Steve Caddel by Darren Birdie: the cartoon commissioned by Saracen Feeds for the Texan on his retirement from Hallway Feeds

They were reared as semi-feral ranch animals on the large farms, with little in the way of extras.

“I grew up in south-west Texas in a semiarid area, it was range land,” he recalls. “There would be areas of open grazing and the underbrush was composed of a type of tree called mesquite tree. The area was also grazed by cattle and the horses got pretty feral in 20,000-acre pasture!

“The mares were very lean – they would constantly be on the move to graze. There would be maybe 25 mares on 3,000-acres with one water source and just sparse bunch grass.

“Those mares carried no extra body weight. They at best scored a body condition score five, but more likely a four plus, and the babies after weaning were lean, too. All the growth went into building a skeleton, it didn’t go into putting extra pounds on the horse.”

WHILE WE MAY think that this lean upbringing was disadvantageous, Caddel says, “Although those horses didn’t mature till they were four, but they were just incredibly durable – you couldn’t break them down with a hammer!”

When the racing Quarter Horse began to become a more specific type within the breed, produced under “assumed” better conditions, the calories fed started to go toward the production of body weight rather than toward skeletal development. However, one experience for the young Caddel left him with a view it was not necessarily the best way to progress.

“There was an old rancher way up in in hill country who was still raising them the old way,” he recalls, laughing: “Those horses were just as wild as march hares!

“We took three of them to Ruidoso Downs in New Mexico, which is a centre for racing Quarter Horses through the summer. We had those three horses in a shed row with 25 farm-raised and fed, racing-bred Quarter Horses, and those three, well they were just different. We never had a bandage on one of them.”

Fast forward ten years, Caddel was running a division of a large Quarter Horse stallion station.

“It was a time when they had started to add hundreds of thousands of dollars in stakes money to the competitions and the horses were the modern-type of quarter horse,” he says. “Some guys brought in some old rangetype mares from Montana, they probably had not seen much extra feed beyond what they were grazing, perhaps an odd bit of extra hay.

“Although those mares never got fat, once they moved to the farm, we started seeing some developmental issues with their babies – they were mares who had never had a horse with a developmental problem in their life.

“They started throwing babies with angular limb deformities, having babies with cartilage defects. It was not a significant number, but we had never seen defects in that type of horse. It was completely out of place, it was at least 10 to 12 years before the thoroughbred industry ever even thought about cartilage defects and the effect of nutrition.”

A conversation in the 1970s, while on a visit to Claiborne Farm to see the legendary Secretariat, also sticks out in Caddel’s mind.

“I was with the vet Dr. Sager and one of the farm managers walked up,” he recalls.

“The conversation came around to the fact that it was green and lush up there, and how good the grass was. I said that it’s not that way in South Texas where I grew up.

“The manager kinda laughed and said, ‘Well, I’ll tell you something, over the years our best crops have come when we have had a drought here, and the quality of the grass was greatly diminished.’ ”

Perhaps after all we don’t need to worry too much if climate change causes our drier summers to become more frequent!

By the 1980s, Cadell had made the move to Kentucky to run a thoroughbred farm housing stallions and breeding horses to race.

The common thinking at the time was that any deformities or issues were due to copper deficiency, but after a meeting with nutritionist Dr. Joe Pagan, Caddel was convinced that was not the answer.

“My personality is such that I’m always interested in new technologies and ideas,” says Caddel. “I met up with Dr. Pagan after a suggestion from my wife, who then edited a Quarter Horse magazine – she had heard him speak at a breeders’ conference.

“The first thing Joe told me that he did when he got to Kentucky was to balance the rations, and he really could not see that copper was the cause of problems.

“While our discussion then was very elementary, we touched on weight and he felt, even then, that young horses were being born and raised too heavy.

“Everything that I had experienced growing up and as a young adult rang true with me, and I understood exactly what he was talking about.”

With a unity of thought the pair started to work in tandem.

“Joe had convinced a farm to let him start weighing their stock regularly from foaling and I worked there for two crops, in the meantime Joe also started Kentucky Equine Research.”

PAGAN, intent on making his mission a reality, then persuaded Hallway Feeds owner Bob Hall to buy a lightweight, mobile-friendly, electronic aluminium scale.

Caddel smiles: “Joe convinced me on my day off to start going around as a mobile weighing service, we had about five or six farms all in the same area that I could easily get around in a day.

“A year later this developed into a full-time role. Although officially I was listed as a salesman for Hallway Feeds, selling did not really fit my personality at all, but Mr Bob told me that if I made myself a ‘problem solver’ for these farm managers, I won’t ever have to sell a bag of feed!”

At the time many of the farms and stud men had not seriously considered the role of nutrition in the production of their horses, and were wary of outside information.

Caddel, with a background on farms, was accepted by the local clan of stud farmers – the mobile weighing service grew, as well as the acceptance of the nutritional advice from KER.

“By 2005 we were weighing 1,000 individuals in a foal crop,” he smiles, “and I would see about an average of 750 yearlings leave the programme in the fall of each year. I got to put my hand on probably more thoroughbreds here in Central Kentucky than any other individual here.

“I loved my job, but I was dedicated to trying to understand the triggering mechanism that predisposes these horses to these developmental problems.”

Through Caddel’s working life, a fundamental change had taken place in the production of the Kentucky-bred racehorse.

The growth and weight data produced by Caddel (left) over 30 years of working has produced quantities of data for KER’s growth monitoring software

In the 1960s, racing began to become economically important; horseracing had started to be seen as a recreational and economically dynamic venture, with a growing rich sector of the population wanting to be involved in and successful at the sport.

This translated into the incredible boom period in the 1980s when big, precocious yearlings who were broader, stouter, and taller with more muscle, became popular at the US sales. Massive prices and profit could be realised at auction for such types, and the market started gravitating to such horses – in response the farms started to aim to produce these bigger yearlings who brought a premium at the sales.

Caddell saw this development take place at essentially the grass root level.

“Our horses started change, very slowly and subtly, but it was an alteration which has continued into this century.

“When Joe took a broad look at the data in the 2000s, the weight of the average yearling, that 50th percentile horse, had increased by 35lb come sale time.

“When we had started out with the weighing programme rarely would I see an 1100lb [500kg] yearling – yearling colts going to sale would be 1000lb [455kg], fillies would be a little lighter.

By the time of Joe’s review, these percentiles had changed, we were finding so many at higher weights, and that horse 1100lb+ horse went from being a rarity to become a much more common individual.

Caddel had also started weighing the mares before and after foaling. He found that after foaling mares would lose just the weight of the pregnancy, and yet within 60 days would be gaining weight.

“I would tell the managers to back off how much food they were giving these mares in January, February, and March,” says Caddel. “We saw it as essential that the farms cut back on calories.

“I really felt over a period of about from 1990 to 2000, we really diminished the number of angular deformities – and that was caused by just cutting back the calories.”

THE BLUE GRASS REGION in Kentucky is famed, but the forage in those pastures can become equine rocket fuel if not handled and managed correctly.

“When the grass is green here, it completely overrides the rest of the nutrition programme, it just throws it out of the water,” he explains.

“Grass is just like any other living entity; it grows to reproduce. It grows stems to put out seed pods, and to do that it’s throwing vast amounts of nutrients and sugar into base of that plant. The farms traditionally keep their pastures cut at six, at most eight inches, so these plants can’t put out seed pods, so all that power is going into the plant. Mares who can just get grossly fat on this grass.”

He adds: “It got to be a bit of joke with the farm managers that their feed salesman was telling them all to cut back on the feed!

I went to Mr. Bob and explained the position to him and, thankfully, he said, ‘Well, if we don’t keep these guys in business, we’re not going to have anybody to sell feed to anyway, so you better go ahead and do what you think you need to do.

The combination of scientific advances in nutrition and field studies of growth, alongside the dedicated co-operation of experienced individuals such as Caddel, forward-thinking feed manufacturers coupled with the willingness of farm managers to share data for the betterment of the breed, and the industry, have all contributed significantly to get us to where we are today.

“So that is where we are now, we understand the trigger point,” says Caddel. “We know now that when foals get to a certain birth weight, as Joe has been explaining at his recent seminars, the weight tends to impinge on those capillary beds where the new cartilage is forming. And it causes defects, while not visible then over a period of months it can become a true lesion.

Caddel does recognise that for some pedigrees these deformities will occur due to genetic predisposition, while also that some will rarely have an issue.

Caddel jokes that he must have been the only salesman who advised stud managers to feed less

Photo: Hallway Feeds

But as he says there is a group of horses for whom that trigger point comes into play and where the successful management by the nutritionist and the farm manager can actively reduce the likelihood of a problem.

He also recognises that horses have been running with “joint defects since racing began”, but with the impact of such strong sales prices, allied with the pressure for horses to develop quickly and race before they are necessarily properly mature, unlike the old ranch type of Quarter Horse that he grew up with, there is a need to ensure that incidences are removed as far as possible; he and Pagan believe this can be achieved by the correct use of nutrition and the monitoring of growth rates both before and after birth.

Although retired from his full-time position, Caddel is continuing to work with a select number of farm managers, still aiming to continue to develop the understanding and importance of nutritional management.

“I am trying to get the farm managers together once a year to discuss what they have been trying out, what worked and what did not work,” explains the 75-year-old, adding: “The whole thing has been fun, but my ultimate goal has always been to get a sounder horse to the racetrack.

“I am hoping that, through the work we have been doing, we can convince the people who put the money out at the sales to make changes in their selection on horses; my goal is to subtlety changing the phenotype and to help improve the soundness of the horse.”

As Lee Hall, vice president of Hallway Feeds, said on Caddel’s retirement: “Having weighed, measured and body condition scored more thoroughbreds than any other individual worldwide, Steve has led Hallway Feeds and Kentucky Equine Research in collecting the largest set of growth data on the breed in the world.”

From Quarter Horses to thoroughbreds, from Texas to Kentucky, from note pad to iPad, Caddel has seen some significant changes in the production of racehorses.

However, the horseman has questioned and queried, used his experience and his daily role constructively for the benefit of our industry – he should be proud of his achievements.

The whole thing has been fun, but my ultimate goal has always been to get a sounder horse to the racetrack