Last month while we were showing at the Fort Worth Stock Show, our good friend, the show manager Nancy Braesicke introduced me to a friend who was a pilot. It was just my luck that during my week off from school this month (Spring Break), he was in Central Texas and had the time to take me on an aerial tour of Buda and our ranch, and let me bring my camera (well, three actually) along!
I thought it might be fun to offer an aerial tour as well.
The picture above shows most of the ranch; it’s just missing one corner, the pasture where we keep the stallions in the winter. This is the only photo that shows the back pasture where we keep many of the horses in the winter.
You can see evidence of the drought we’ve had in this picture, it’s been a very dry year!
We have three major barns that we use for the horses. The one at the top of the photo above is our main barn. The show string, our geldings, yearling and two-year-old colts and fillies live here. The barn farthest to the right in the picture is our hay barn as well as a shelter for horses in that pen/pasture. And finally, everyone’s favorite, the foaling barn is at the bottom of the photo. The foaling barn has six stalls with closed-circuit cameras that run to the house where we can watch for mares to go into labor. The mares who seem to be farther from foaling spend the night in the lot to the left of the barn so they can be checked on during the night.
The view above really points out the terracing of the land, which helps prevent erosion in those pastures. That land is split into several pastures by electric fences. During breeding season, we put one stallion and a specific group of mares in each of these pastures.
A big thanks to my friend Matt for flying me around the ranch and putting up with all of my cameras!
Here are some video clips from the flight: