My Dressage

My Greatest Dressage Challenge

USDF members tell how they overcame obstacles and found success

Getting a dressage business off the ground remains the greatest challenge sporthorse breeder and trainer Willy Arts has faced in his nearly 40-year career in the sport.

In 1984, at the age of 25, Arts emigrated from his native Netherlands to help Tony and Betty DeGroot establish their DG Bar Ranch in Hanford, California. Today Arts is the facility’s co-owner, head trainer, and manager. The DeGroot family stills owns and operates the farm, which is known nationwide

for its commitment to dressage and as a producer of quality Dutch Warmbloods.

The equine operation was—and remains—an adjunct to the DeGroot family’s large dairy business. As such, they had plenty of land—but also a challenge in that Hanford, situated in the San Joaquin Valley between Bakersfield and Fresno, is far from California’s established coastal dressage centers.

“It was hard to get people to come to the Valley, so it was hard to establish a name,” Arts says. Solution: “We started organizing a big dressage show. We had a dressage show here for 18 years. That was a big, big help to get started and to get people to travel to Hanford.” Dressage at DG Bar Ranch “turned into one of the biggest shows on the West Coast.”

Arts also needed to make a name for himself. “I traveled around, did a lot of clinics, in Reno, in the Vancouver area, and in Los Angeles.” The show and the clinics “were tools to get recognition of the quality of horses we had available, and to help to get people to come buy horses, people to come for lessons, and just to get the business going.”

The timing of the facility’s establishment was fortuitous because it enabled DG Bar to ride the swelling wave of interest in dressage in the US in the 1980s—which sparked the import, sales, and breeding of sport horses to meet the demand.

In the beginning “we had a couple of stallions available for breeding,” Arts says. “Thirty-five years ago, warmbloods were becoming more and more popular. The stallions we had were some of the first ones that were imported to the US. They were helpful in getting the breeding portion [of the business] going, and getting the Dutch Warmblood association to acknowledge DG Bar.”

Arts soon noticed that sporthorse breeding in the US was a bit different from the European approach.

“In Holland, is it common that you breed [both] jumping horses and dressage horses,” he explains. “Over here, I found out that with the interest here and with the distance involved, it’s hard to do both disciplines. And so we focused more toward dressage after we were into the breeding for a few years.”

Today, “we maybe import less than we used to,” says Arts. “Importing was better in those days, because of, first of all, the exchange rates. Now we [are] focused on a breeding program and the breeding goals that we have. The sales from the horses out of our own breeding program keep us going, now that importing is a little bit less.”

DG Bar is now a full-service facility that offers “breeding, training, sales, teaching, every aspect. We have boarding. And then, for the last eight years or so, we have had the 70-day tests, the performance tests for the Friesian stallions.”

Arts’ advice to prospective breeders: “Start with the best quality you can afford and the best quality you can find. Do your research. Have a plan so that you don’t just jump in and then learn as you go. Have a plan, and then educate yourself. Compare. It’s expensive, but it’s the quality that will succeed and quality that will keep it fun. Otherwise, it can turn into a lot of work and create frustration, and you have a hard time selling horses.”

FROM THE GROUND UP: Willy Arts helped build DG Bar Ranch into a preeminent West Coast dressage facility, and today he’s one of our country’s top sport-horse-breeding experts and a faculty member of the USDF Sport Horse Prospect Development Forum

By Katherine Walcott

Katherine Walcott is a freelance writer based in Alabama. For many years she contributed the “Behind the Scenes” column to USDF Connection.