Like many farmers, we started our Livery Yard because we
had grass paddocks that were too small for growing arable crops and a building
that was no use for modern agricultural needs. Maybe you’re in the same
position and have decided to put in a few stables but aren’t sure where to
begin. If you don’t like horses and you don’t want people in your yard, then
you probably don’t need to go any further but I enjoy seeing horses in the fields
and the farm yard has a good buzz when there are people in and around the
stables. Having a Livery Yard is a good thing for our farm.
Although DIY liveries would have brought in more money, when we started we
didn’t have enough room to store their feed and tack in individual secure units
and as my knowledge of horses is limited we thought it better to find someone
to rent the stables and operate as a Livery yard. We accepted that we wouldn’t have any say in
their customers (though that hasn’t been a problem for us) and left them to
find and look after the liveries (some full and some part), collect the money
and pay us rent for the whole yard.
Before you start, agree the
responsibilities of each side ie who will empty the muck heap? Other questions
might include will you retain control of turnout in the winter? Do you need a
safe route through the yard for horses? Are dogs allowed? What hours can people use the yard?(Your
planning permission may restrict these anyway – initially our local council
wanted to limit access to Monday to Saturday until we pointed out that horses
need feeding and caring for seven days a week.) Do you mind if people wander
anywhere and ride along farm tracks or should you apply restrictions? Get an
Agreement drafted and signed.
We set our price by working out a commercial rent for
the building plus a grazing cost and when we added facilities we knew how much
return we wanted on our capital, so it was easy to calculate the rent increase.
Ah, I haven’t mentioned the extra facilities have I? Well, no matter what you
provide, it will never be enough. We started with five stables but our Livery
Yard Operator was soon asking for more stables, then a sand school with
floodlighting, more stables, a larger tack room, horse walker …
All these extra facilities need paying for and when there’s
plenty of grass, hay is cheap to buy and there’s no recession, the finances are
OK. But a rise in feed price, difficulty replacing liveries who leave or the Livery
Yard Operator filling the stables with their own horses instead of paying
liveries can lead to financial crisis. It’s easy to give the Livery Yard
Operator a month’s grace to pay – after all, if they leave you’ll probably have
at least a month’s void anyway – but soon it will be two month’s rent owed and
then three ... Make sure your agreement has a clause regarding non payment and
stick to it. When our Livery Yard Operator got into arrears as he struggled to
fill the stables, we gave rent-free months and charged half the rent for nearly
a year before returning to full rent when the stables filled up. Despite this, the
outstanding debt remained unpaid and when he left he told people it was because
we’d doubled the rent. Remember it’s a business and if it doesn’t pay, it has
to end. There’ll always be another person to take on the yard.
When your Livery Yard Operator moves out, agree with them
what should be left; we once discovered that all our electric fencing and the
fixings from the tack room had been sold off, which was a bit of a surprise. We
prefer all the liveries to leave the yard when our Agreement with Livery Yard Operator ends, though this isn’t
popular with them. Our last Livery Yard Operator has just moved out; he put a
skip in the yard and cleared out all the broken barrows, buckets and other
things that gradually build up in hidden corners and cleaned up. When the new
Operator starts next month it means they will come into a fresh yard not
cluttered with someone else’s rubbish and can choose their own liveries on
their own terms.
We’ve scaled back our stables a lot so that the yard will
just have six stables, with a horse walker and sand school to themselves, but
when the financial climate bucks up, we plan to install more stables in a
purpose built yard. It's certainly been very quiet around here for the past few weeks without any horses or people in the yard and I'm looking forward to their return.
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