Same crap, different season

It seems everywhere you look these days, news articles are becoming more and more incredulous with their details leaving you simply shaking your head in disbelief.

Current events like those we are seeing in Palestine with the unjust and unnecessary waste of human life where an average of 10 children every day are having limbs amputated is one such example. It’s not often I find myself having to turn off the news and look away, but such is the gravity of the conflict in the Gaza Strip for which the politics are now vastly irrelevant, it’s become my reality.

I found another head shaker this week from the desk of Harness Racing New Zealand regarding this season’s breeding numbers.

Within its discourse was a feeble attempt to once again downplay a significant reduction in the number of mares being served, something that has been happening for over 30 years.

The article included a quote from the interim CEO, Mauro Barsi, which states: “This year’s figure is not a disaster but it is less than we had hoped for”.

A reduction of 200+ individual mares served in a population which has already shrunk below 2000 for the first time 60 years might not be a disaster on the scale to which I have referred to overseas. No lives have been lost or displaced. But when are we going to stop trying to put lipstick on a pig?

To be clear, none of this is the fault of the interim CEO. Nor is it a problem that is unique to New Zealand, with foal populations reducing everywhere around the world. However, having worked in the breeding sector for the majority of my professional career, there is a wee bit of qualification that comes with my opinion that the next statement can be taken with a grain of salt.

“The figures have shown us again that getting breeding numbers up in the next few years is an absolute priority,” said Barsi.

The only constant in the resolution of the breeding numbers problem has been minimal investment and the same tired response.

When I was first employed by the New Zealand Standardbred Breeders Association, one of the board members who would soon graduate to be Chair bailed me up and asked me directly, “What are you going to do about breeding numbers?”

Being bright-eyed, bushy-tailed and somewhat naive, I thought I could make a difference. The reality was, with the resources available, it was next to impossible.

In the six years that preceded my employment, and the seven years that followed, the total annual investment from Harness Racing New Zealand to the breeding sector was a $100,000 per annum grant which was given to the kindred body, the NZSBA.

HRNZ has had a total operating expenditure of $40million+ for close to two decades. Loosely speaking, the annual budgeted costs/investment for the sector tasked with providing product has been 0.002% of its overall financial budget. It’s like giving a builder a piece of four by two and asking him to build you a home.

Better yet, the ‘grant’ more or less passed the buck of responsibility for breeding numbers onto a kindred body with one full-time employee and an executive of hard-working and passionate volunteers, all the while expecting them to turn water into wine. Here’s your money, good luck boys and girls.

Limiting the real power of the kindred body and its ability to truly advocate on behalf of its members/stakeholders was the fact its own survival and ability to employ someone full-time depended on the investment from HRNZ. As the saying goes, “don’t bite the hand that feeds you.”

For the first few years, you put up proposals that you believe with the right investment and industry buy-in can make a difference.

As time wore on, slowly you begin to realise that being armed with little more than a knife in a gunfight, your ability to effect the change needed was nondescript and yet every year the Executive was expected to prove it was making a difference to a board of directors that included more than a handful of breeders.

In March of each year, the figures painted the same sorry picture, yet every year a failing business was and is more determined to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic. You know what they say about the definition of insanity…

It was rather ironic then upon resigning from the role as the national breeding manager that a month later, a press release was issued with the headline: $1m plus breeding incentive announced for this season

The article made many bold claims for investment with schemes that were designed to improve breeding numbers in the immediate future.

Fast forward two years to the breeding season in which a $3000 credit would be paid to breeders who produce another foal over their base rate.

In lay terms, if you produced a live microchipped foal in 2023, and increased the number of mares bred from the season prior, you would receive a $3000 rebate against a stallion service fee upon proving a 42 day positive scan.

Compared to the breeding initiatives that have preceded it recently, none of which actually reward or incentivise the breeder for making a breeding decision in the season just gone, the above had the ability to incentivise breeders to at the very least produce an extra foal or two this season.

The former CEO Gary Woodham alluded to this when he claimed: “We have to do something and do something big, the current trend shows a five to 10 per cent decline on foal numbers every year and that is not sustainable. We are looking to incentivise breeders, we have to stabilise and then increase the number of foals being produced. We want breeders to have their foals this breeding season and then go again, knowing they will get a credit on their next stallion service fee.”

Despite being notified by breeders and the Kindred Body responsible for breeding that very little had been done to make the terms and conditions readily available and better yet, actively promote the scheme, management decided to let the forewarning fall on deaf ears.

An invitation to do the work for them using readily available resources was also declined by the management of HRNZ, for reasons known only to the now departed racing manager and CEO.

With an incredible database and platform at their fingertips such as Infohorse, it would have been bloody easy to contact every breeder within the system and notify them of their eligibility and provide them with the appropriate information necessary to understand the scheme and take advantage of it. It would be interesting to learn how many of the actual recipients of the scheme were in fact the hobby breeders who needed it, and the ones least likely to ‘be in the know’.

If Harness Racing New Zealand was serious about addressing the breeding problem and arresting the annual 5-10% decline, it had an obligation to promote, and to the best of its ability, execute a scheme it had spent countless hours devising and actually budgeted for.

The fact it did nothing just further accentuates the problems at hand and begs the question, did senior management choose to act this way because it didn’t want to have to spend the money it had promised stakeholders? Or was it ego-driven, with power brokers happy to see a scheme fail based on the personalities of those behind devising it? Probably a combination of both is a safe bet. But neither one of them is acceptable.

And how can anyone be surprised when in November, the NZSBA published a survey of its members indicating as such! It’s like warning the captain of the Titanic of an iceberg and choosing to ignore it. Alternative solutions were offered and again, ignored.

How can anyone who bred to a NZ bred stallion this season in the hopes of earning a 10% bonus on all stakes won have any confidence the scheme will even be around by the time the foals they produced this term make it to the races in light of the contempt this scheme was treated with?

Any breeding decisions made this season will take at a minimum four to five years before we see any real benefit to our racing population. Ironically, that’s the same amount of time given in the promised additional revenue from Entain to Harness Racing New Zealand. We’ve just wasted a year of it.

In four years when funding is going to be based on the performance of each code, would you not think actively trying to achieve an increased racing population capable of withstanding some of the economic variances would be a great start?

The one thing Barsi was accurate in saying in his press release was the statement that “seeing is believing”.

I hope I’m wrong, but excuse my pessimism in assuming we will be dishing out the same tired discourse in 12 months’ time around breeding numbers and merely hoping they will improve.

by Brad Reid, for Harnesslink