Wednesday Morning Feed from World Equestrian Brands

One thing you may or may not realize about Horse Nation is that it’s written an almost exclusively volunteer basis. All of the columns, stories and weekly features that you look forward to reading on a daily basis? The people who write them are doing so out of the kindness and generosity of their own hearts.

That Horse Nation is able to bring you the quality and quantity of work that it does on a daily basis, on a TINY FRACTION of the operating budget of a normal horse magazine, is actually pretty astounding if you think about it.

All the credit, of course, goes to the writers themselves. Without their donations of talent, hard work and expertise, our operation would grind to a halt pretty quickly.

But what is their incentive for doing so? I truly believe–and it blow my mind to wrap my head around this–that they’re doing it because they want to play an active role in the dialogue of equestrian culture. Every day, we’re shaping the future of horses and horse sport with the words we use to talk about them.

What we aim to do here at Horse Nation is to lift up the aspects of equestrian culture that we love the most, which oftentimes means shining a light on people, places and pursuits that might otherwise get overlooked. That’s something that I can’t do alone, sitting here in my office. It’s not even something an entire editorial staff is capable of accomplishing. It takes an open-door stable full of writers from every walk of equestrian life to root out the good stuff and bring it to the attention of a larger audience.

That’s what Horse Nation is, at its essence: a collective assembly of perspectives and experiences that together begin to create a more accurate representation of life with horses. That’s what sets Horse Nation apart from every other horse publication out there. It’s a community project.

I am eternally thankful to every writer who contributes to Horse Nation. I try to communicate my gratitude with emails full of exclamation points and praise, but it’s still an unequal exchange–I’m definitely getting the long end of the stick. Later today, however, I’ll be making an exciting announcement about a new incentive that rewards outstanding Horse Nation writers for their work. So stay tuned for that!

Thanks for writing, thanks for reading, and Go Riding.