Working for the world

ACCORDING TO THE SCIENTISTS climate change is the biggest challenge facing humanity, an existential crisis that threatens life on earth like none previously faced in the entirety of human history.

November’s COP26 in Glasgow was billed as perhaps our final opportunity to arrest the emissions fuelled destruction of the only home we have. Agriculture in its various forms stands in the harsh glare of the beams searching for those sectors on which the blame for earth’s destruction can be easily laid, but not so easily remedied.

Equine agriculture, while not pursued with nearly the same intensity as beef farming or cereal growing enterprises are in some areas of the globe, does have a role to play in the rehabilitation of agriculture’s image and in leading the way to a more sustainable climate and habitable world.

This is the passionately held belief of Mariann Klay and Des Leadon of Swordlestown Little Stud and it is one that she articulates eloquently and demonstrates beautifully on their farm, where sustainable agricultural practices and stud farming in harmony with nature have been the couple’s guiding principles since before Greta Thunberg was even born.

“I really believe that this is important and that stud farming can have a positive role to play in developing and promoting sustainable agriculture practices,” states Klay.

"We don’t have to produce high milk proteins and high milk yields or have the grass full of nitrogen to produce those or to achieve daily weight gains.”

Words are easy and don’t cost much but actions are more difficult. Klay, and her husband Leadon, are putting in the hard yards to create a stud farm that is sustainable and fits with its environment.

But the problems we face are simultaneously global and local, and solutions of both natures are required.

On the local level a battery storage station is proposed for nearby Dunnstown, not far from Swordlestown Little, and it is currently going through the planning appeals process.

The station would house 76 battery storage units, each the size of a shipping container, to generate electricity. Alongside this storage facility, a 220kv electricity substation would be built as would a grid connection to an existing substation.

The environmental impact of thousands of lithium-ion cells, not just on the local area outside Naas, which is close to Punchestown racecourse and over 20 stud farms, but on the countries where the lithium is extracted and the people who work in that industry, worries Klay greatly.

There is not much more anyone can do but continue to campaign and fight against the facility, which has been refused planning permission by Kildare County Council but has organisation has appealed that decision to the national body, An Bord Pleanala. This, and more, are issues that the breeders of Lilbourne Lad and Dinozzo are passionate about, and have been for years.

Mariann is Swiss, and grew up on a farm in a country where recycling was something everybody did without the need for public information campaigns or government levies.

So Klay and Leadon are busying themselves creating a stud farm that is rich in biodiversity, where the fields, which are nourished by organic fertiliser, still bear the scars of the ridges that failed to yield to a potato harvest 150 years ago during the great hunger which ravaged Ireland.

Pollinator corridors, creating a haven for wildlife to exist in harmony with the agricultural enterprise, are seen as vitally important and one way in which stud farms can become more environmentally sustainable, as is the careful nurturing of the habitats that are found in abundance on studs around the world.

“The hedges are probably one of the most important features on a stud farm for nature, be it birds or be it invertebrates, so we cut them on a two or three-year rotation and we only breast them, we don’t top them,” says Klay.

“We have strips of grass around the farm that we don’t cut, we leave and mow it once a year. We planted a little woodland of deciduous broadleaf trees and put in new hedges,” she points out on a tour of the land.

Many people embarked on home-based projects to busy themselves through the long weeks of pandemic lockdown and Klay and Leadon were no different. Their lockdown project was the creation of a wildlife pond, which has become home to a variety of species.

The couple adopts a different approach to the management of grazing as well, with the emphasis on a diverse sward rather than a grassland monoculture.

“Rotational grazing is very important and sheep and cattle from neighbouring farms graze the land here when they are needed,” outlines Klay.

“Our grassland is multi-species and very diverse, we are not great believers in reseeding because the ground takes a long time to settle afterwards and I don’t like that monoculture rye grass. The horses love the multi-species approach and cattle do very well here too.”

It has forced her to reconsider a previously held belief too.

“The horses put on a lot of bone here too, I always scoffed at that talk, but maybe there is something in it,” she confides. “Even foals that I think might be a bit light of bone, if I can keep them to yearling stage I can see the difference in their bones after that year on the grass.

“I think on stud farms we need to get away a little bit from the manicured approach and we need to think of leaving areas alone and reserving them for nature.

Like her husband, who is a worldrenowned clinician, Klay is a veterinary surgeon with neonatal medicine a particular focus. However, she is keen to turn that scientific background and rigour to the questions posed by climate change for equine agriculture.

On a global, or more accurately, European level through the European Federation of Thoroughbred Breeders’ Associations (EFTBA), Klay is hoping to receive support for a proposed research project that would investigate sustainable agricultural practices and then develop a template approach to calculate the carbon footprint of a stud farm.

With the information available, breeders and farm managers would then be able to make the adjustments necessary to reduce their carbon footprint. There is already research being conducted in this area for other forms of agriculture, but not for stud farming.

She expands a little on what the research would entail

Klay is keen to get involved in the Irish Thoroughbred Breeders’ Association’s recently announced objective of studying carbon emissions and biodiversity levels on Irish stud farms in 2022. Radical action will be needed in all sectors of society if the country is to stand a chance of meeting the government’s ambitious plans to reduce carbon emissions by half in a little over eight years.

On a misty autumn afternoon, the grey of the Irish sky cannot hide the fruits and berries which gleam like jewels in the hedges that surround the paddocks of Swordlestown Little where the foals happily graze, their morning’s work done.

The stocking density on the land is low. Klay and Leadon have just half a dozen broodmares of their own, along with a few boarders.

Swordlestown Little is proof that this more inclusive and harmonious approach works.

THE AFOREMENTIONED Lilbourne Lad, who won the Group 2 Railway Stakes and was runner-up in the Group 1 Middle Park Stakes for Richard Hannon, was born and raised in this environment. As was Dinozzo, a son of Lilbourne Lad bred by Swordlestown, who went on to become a Group 3 winner in Hong Kong and finish third in the Group 1 Hong Kong Gold Cup.

Last year, the farm sold two of the three Frankel foals that jointly topped the 2020 Goffs November Foal Sale, including the half-brother to Dinozzo. Clearly the approach works for both the sales ring and the track.

Klay, who held an amateur jockey’s licence and rode out for John Oxx for nigh on 30 years, which is where she met her husband, is still working hands-on with the mares and foals as the stud celebrates 20 years in business.

Along with two assistants her day begins with handwalking the foals – Swordlestown Little consigned at this year’s Goffs November Foal Sale with the memories of the farm’s best day in the ring still in mind.

“That was a fantastic day, just an unbelievable experience,” she says of the extraordinary 35 minutes at Kildare Paddocks last December when four Frankel foals sold in quick succession. “They were the four most expensive foals in the sale, with three of them, including Swordlestown Little’s homebred colt and a filly consigned on behalf of a client, making €440,000 apiece.

“It’s only later that you can appreciate what has happened. It only sinks in later. It was the same when we bred and sold the Galileo half-brother to Lilbourne Lad. It is only later on that it sinks in. While you have them you are so focused on getting them to the sale and doing your best with, the same as you are for every foal. It is only when they are gone that you sit back and realise just what has happened.”

The identity of the buyers of Dinozzo’s half-brother made it an extra special.

“It was quite incredible for me to have a foal good enough for Juddmonte to buy. That was just wonderful and I was so delighted. I have been to see him a few times and he is developing so well and I am looking forward to seeing him on the track.” His dam Nisriyna did not have a foal in 2021, but she is in-foal to Wootton Bassett.

The Frankel filly sold by Swordlestown last year is a half-sister to Group 2 Prix de la Nonette and Dahlia Stakes winner Terebellum, who gave Circus Maximus a proper fight in the Group 1 Queen Anne Stakes last year. Terebellum’s Sea The Stars full-sister was catalogued at Goffs this month.

“She is an early foal and her pedigree alone is probably enough to recommend her, but she is a really nice foal, lovely and correct,” is how Klay describes the latest daughter of the Group 3 Brownstown Sakes winner Marvada from the family of Group 1 winners Charge d’Affaires and Collateral Freedom.

Any foal bred by Klay and Leadon is getting off to the most fortunate of starts as Swordlestown Little is a model stud farm in every sense. The attention to detail is no surprise to anyone who knows them and it is reflected in the standard of the foals sold each year at Goffs.

But their futures, as of the humans who breed and care for them, are inextricably linked with the health of the land.

As most of the world’s leaders congregated in Glasgow this month attempting to agree on solutions for the existential crisis that grips the planet, one small stud farm in County Kildare stands as a beacon of hope, a local solution with global relevance to a problem that is both local and global.