Equine Opportunities - Editor's Page - Discover Southside

It all started with an invitation to a Blessing of the Hounds. Since it seemed like a good idea to do a horse related item or two in addition to covering that event, we started doing a little research into the horse world in Southside, Virginia. Along the way we learned that there are over 215,000 horses in Virginia, and Virginia is home to a $1.6 billion horse industry. That is a huge economic impact.

While Northern and Central Virginia are better known for Equestrian events, we knew Southside had a big share of them too. Once we started looking, the floodgates opened. We called one local stable, and they suggested we contact a farrier they thought highly of, who gave us a list of people we should talk to. Each of those people gave us more suggestions.

One thing lead to another and we decided to dedicate an entire issue to an Equestrian theme.

As we traveled around Southside meeting and interviewing people, we began to realize we had only scratched the surface. Several articles later, we still hadn't used a fraction of the material we had collected, and we knew one issue wouldn't be enough. We just didn't have the time or space to cover it all in this month's issue.

In the future we plan to cover some of the people and facilities that were so generous with their time and some of the events, which they told us about. To those who gave their time if we haven't covered the topic in this issue, we didn�t look a gift horse in the mouth (apologies for the bad pun) it is planned for the near future and once again we do thank you.

So with our appreciation to the many great people who were full of good information and even more resources to check, we present this month's offerings.

Of course, we couldn't do any of this without the support of all our advertisers.

Thanks again to all who contributed to this issue.

WB Carver - Editor/Publisher