by Lee Alley.
Find your Black Hills dream home at Rapid City Search .com

LOCATION: Five Mistakes to Avoid When Buying Horse Properties (Part-IV)

Wouldn't it be great to live with your horses far away from the crowd, in the peaceful serenity of your very own heavenly acreage?  In short, "NO!"

Not exactly.  There are some practical issues to keep in mind when you are in the process of considering which property-location might be best for you and your horses.  Maybe Roy Rogers wanted "a home where the buffalo roam, where the deer and the antelope play."  But he had Dale Evans to keep him company there, and a whole movie studio staff to sleep with his one horse back in the city.

The choices you make in selecting a horse property will impact your life and your family's and animals' lives every day from now on.  Discount these factors at your own peril:

• Roads and Access
• Urgent medical care 
• Veterinary care
• Farrier care
• Groceries and feed
• School bus route
• Emergency-vehicle access
• Water delivery
• Telecommunications service
• Risks of fire, wind and hail.

ROADS– Roads leading to remote getaway properties are often not the best, and they’re often not so great for trailering horses over. Are the roads leading to the property you have in mind well maintained? Are they too narrow to accommodate two vehicles passing one another? Are they prone to flooding or winter closures? Roads are your lifeline to the world. Without them, you could be stuck for a few days during the most challenging seasons of the year.

Here in the Black Hills most rural roads are maintained (plowed, smoothed) by one of three means.  The County or State handles most miles.  But your last mile may be under jurisdiction of a "Road District."  This is where the neighbors with property adjoinig the road work with the County to create a legal-status Board to maintain the road.  (The property owners elect their board from among themselves).  A Home Owners Association may handle road maintenance (ask your realtor to check this, and make your expectations a clause in your purchase offer). Often, too, Good Sam from down at the end of the road has had a plow on his 1957 pickup for years, and "no problem, Sam will always to it for free!"  The last method of road maintenance is you.  You just may have succeeded in your desire to live in the middle of nowhere.  It that's your cup of tea, great.  We have more acres of "nowhere" for sale than just about anywhere else in the Old West.

URGENT MEDICAL CARE - I guess it has to be this way, but EMT's tend to utilize those monstrous fire trucks for taxi service.  When my neighbor in the adjoining ranchette suffered a heart incident one night, the fire truck ferrying the EMT's had difficulty maneuvering along our 4WD access road.  Hmmm...

VETERINARY CARE – Horses require regular check-ups as well as some routine veterinary care, and while your vet might be willing to travel, you are going to end up paying a lot more for house calls if he or she has to drive for hours to get to you. Can you float your horses’ teeth yourself, and administer vaccinations? Can you identify common diseases, and can you take your horses’ temperatures? Can you draw blood for annual Coggins and other tests as required? Can you deal with your horses in case of emergency? Do you know how to stop the flow of blood from a nasty cut, or deal with a case of colic?

Keep all these things and more in mind as you determine just how far away from veterinary care you want to live, and remember that federal and state guidelines for vaccination and testing need to be adhered to if you want to keep your horses healthy and safe as well as if you plan to transport them at all. The South Dakota Animal Industry Board, for example, requires all horses transported to have a negative Equine Infectious Anemia test on file, and common equine diseases such as Equine Encephalitis are present in the state.

FARRIER – Unless you can trim and shoe your horse yourself, he or she has to be seen by a qualified farrier with regularity – at least every six weeks, and maybe even more often than that depending on a number of factors. Living far away from a farrier means that you are going to have to make appointments well in advance, and it also means that you may end up paying your farrier more for traveling out to see you. Remember the old adage – “For want of a nail, the shoe was lost. For want of a shoe, the horse was lost. For want of a horse, the battle was lost.” Without proper hoof care, your horses’ health can rapidly decline, leaving you with a lame horse you can’t ride, and leading to even more horse health expenses.

FEED– Are you going to be able to make hay yourself, or do you have assurance from a nearby neighbor that he or she will be making enough hay to sell some to you? How about feed and supplements? Living a long distance from a feed store and being far away from hay supplies can be costly. If you have to pay for hay, then pay to have it transported to your hideaway; you could end up paying twice as much as you would if your horse property were more conveniently located. If you have to drive a long distance to pick up a load of feed and supplements, the same thinking applies. Over time, these costs really add up, taking away from the amount of money you have in your budget for other things, like that new saddle you’ve been dreaming about buying.

The Black Hills are known for exceedingly steep hillsides.  Being transplants from the city, we launched our Ten Green Acres Hobby Farm near Piedmont, South Dakota on one of those hillsides.  Hardly a level square yard on the entire 10 acres.  It's nearly impossible to back the truck up the steep hillside in snow in the winter time to deliver 25-30 much-needed bails of hay.  Can you imagine what it's like to hand carry 25 bails of hay up a steep hill in 10 inches of snow?  Avoid it.  I did.  I bought a 1/4-ton wheel borrow.  Gas powered, 4 wheel drive!  I move a truckload of hay in short order by a flat bed trailer made from a wheeled toboggan.  Then we started using it everywhere, including my wife hauling up to two tons(!) of compost to her gardens in a single weekend.

SCHOOL BUS ROUTE- It's always a good idea to check out the school bus route.  Great if it comes right past your house.  Not for the kids.  That's good for them to brag when they get old about how they had to slog through deep snow drifts to get to school.  The reason you want to be on a bus route is that's where the county's snow plows are likely to prioritize what to plow first.  (Duh).

FAMILY CONVENIENCE – Sometimes we get so caught up in thinking about our horses, daydreaming about how much we’ll enjoy being able to ride right off the property and away into the sunset, that we forget about the conveniences that allow us to spend time actually doing what we love. Sure, some people can work from home, and some people don’t have to think about commuting or getting kids to school, but many of us need to go to work each day and we need to get our kids to school and back, plus we have to travel for extracurricular activities.  Sometimes it's very difficult to mix "horse property" with afterschool activities.  The closer your property is to school, work, soccer fields, favorite fishing hole the better.

WATER DELIVERY-You, your horses and your family, pets, laundry and toilets need water every day.  Not 3 days from now when the the road you fell in love with is snowed in, and it turns out not to be on a county-priority school bus route.  Just storing a few days' supply of water is not easy when it's 10-degrees outside.  If you're going to be storing backup water, an underground cistern is best by far, followed by a solar heated tank.

I put a water meter on my home which is served by our private well, and learned we match the national average pretty close, i.e., 125 gallons per day per family.  At roughly 8-12 gallons per day for a horse, let's say 8, with two horses, that's 16 more, totalling about 140 gallons per day, 1,000 gallons per week and 4,000 gallons per month.  Those green translucent water tanks you see on the backs of pickups hold about 350 gallons.  That's about three deliveries per week, once every 2-3 days.  If the electric power goes out on your well pump, you'll get real good real quick at this "water-math."  Welcome to "out west where the buffalo roam."

Our home is all-electric (i.e., when the power goes out, no hot water, no heat, one remaining flush per toilet).  I have now bought two LARGE generators.  One is 5,000 watts.  The other one was delivered via semi-trailer truck and is big enough to run a small town.  To each his own.  

For power outages, we installed a backup wood stove.  The cheapest we could find, and it is more than adequate to make our home livable on the coldest winter nights, just in case.  It began as a cute thing for weekends.  And for backup.  Now we try to heat with it all the time.  Much less expensive, since I have been thinning the surrounding forest to fight pine beetles, and then two years later burn the dried wood.  Great cycle.  When power outages do occur I do wind up hand carrying a lot of buckets of un-frozen water to the barns for the animals.

TELECOMMUNICATIONS- This is sticky.  There are four main ways to get on the phone and/or on the Internet in rural South Dakota:

• Phone company traditional "land line" (a solid wire, probably underground to the house)
• Cellular-only
• Direct line of sight
• Satellite uplink/downlink.

The traditional "phone line" is fine, I guess.  But when I called our local phone company, who was running a new fiber cable north-south along the eastern foothills of the Black Hills, they said they would not run a fiber spur a half mile to our enclave of 30 or so ten-acre ranchettes due to so little business that presented.  When the service remained fairly low tech, we switched.

We then tried the satellite approach for several years.  Their ad's had claimed "broadband" and "high speed" and "reliable", blah blah blah.  Trouble is, their Service Agreement, written by their lawyer, only said they sell broadband, but by the time that bandwidth is diluted among the excessive number of customers they signed up, we could not buy broadband.  The Service Agreement says, in very clear fine print, somewhere on page 58, that I could expect to pay at least $67 per month, but could expect only "up to" broadband speed (and "up to" includes "zero").  In fact, I got pretty good at knowing how dark the storm clouds are, by how much my internet speed slowed, or stopped altogether.  And on holidays and snow days when all the neighbors were home competing with me for a share of that "broadband," service could nearly stop.

For the past few years we have been (generally) happily all-cellular.  Even internet access.  My cell phone acts as a wi-fi hub for all three computers in our home.  Works ok most of the time.  Most reliable of all we have tried.  Sure, it's a bit slower.  In fact, some weekend mornings it's nearly as comatose as the satellite system often was.  (I'm not sure, but I believe most telecom companies' self-protective contracts guarantee no more bandwidth than "up to xyz."  Which seems to me the same as them committing to "as low as" zero service.)  Still, Verizon has been great at helping me to anticipate and manage my own user-driven overage charges.  We're happy enough.  But just glad that we get cell service up in The Hills. 

I've had several clients who have been happy with direct line of sight bandwidth resellers.  There are some around Sturgis, Rapid City , etc.  And my clients seem to have been happy with them.  But when I asked these providers, they checked and found that no line of sight can reach my home from their towers.

I hear a lot of comments about "AT&T service is bad, get Verizon."  Or "Verizon is bad..." or "satellite stinks."  Seems to me that real life testimonials from a close neighbor is a far better indicator of service quality than street talk or company advertising claims.

I hope these telecom stories clarify and emphasize how important it can be to balance "middle of nowhere" with "out of range" when you select a location for your horse property.

WEATHER RISKS-My insurance agent claims wind damage from toppled pine trees is a greater factor than forest fire, in our home hazard insurance.  I'm not sure.  Our soil is shallow, but still, the trees seem very reluctant to let go of vertical.  In fact, I have thinned the forest near our home, exposing the remaining trees to greater wind stress.  But only one of hundreds of trees over ten acres has met its match from the wind.  

Out on the prairie, the wind can be fierce and persistent.  If your horse property is out of the forest, plan on having to secure things that can blow away.  Even in the forest the wind was so strong one night last winter that I discovered next morning that the top had blown off a bee hive, exposing the bees to 23 ° F temperature.

Just in case this all sounds as if I regret our location choice...not one bit.  I'll never leave the Black Hills, and hope to stay alive until my funeral, staying right where we are.  I'd do it again, exactly.  Location-wise.  (Homestead layout-planning was hit and miss and I am paying for that).  That we share a boundary with the Black Hills National Forest is priceless.  We have a 2,000,000 acre back yard, all maintained by the public, including Federal taxpayers as far away as Seattle.  Thank you, Seattle.  Come visit sometime.

 Meanwhile, this completes Part-IV of the five part series on avoiding mistakes when investing in a Black Hills Rapid City area horse property.  In the next installment we will mention some helpful tips about long term planning for the layout and operations, plus some legal and real estate value-enhancement ideas.  See you back here then...

1. Part-1: What Makes a "Horse Property?"
2. Part-2: Fences
3. Part-3: Access and Vehicle Maneuvering
4. Part-4: Location and Siting
5. Part-5: Planning