For many years, Anna and I have owned horses together. We have used or investigated many different options for horse health over the year. Over the past year, a few things have occurred in our lives and on our farm that made us step back and reconsider the products we used on our animals. In the process, we became fans of and advocates for Zephyr’s Garden equine products. Here is why.
In 2011, we decided to start raising meat products on the farm for our family. This decision was based on health concerns about commercial food supply chains, such as uncontrolled use of antibiotics in meat animals. There are a lot of documentaries and articles about the food supplies in the US, and the more we learned, the more concerned we became. Now, over 90% of the meat we consume at our house was raised by us, harvest wild game, or raised by another local, small farm. This also led us to start raising dairy goats for the milk supply. We switched the family to raw goat milk and haven’t regretted it at all. Since we were now eating meat from our farm, and drinking milk from our animals, we were concerned about chemical usage on the farm and the impact on our own meat/milk supply. Additionally, our garden is next to the horse area and we stopped using all chemicals in our garden.
In late April 2012, we discovered a mass on Devil (Vicki’s pony). It was cancer and you can read the whole story about the surgery here. While we don’t know what specifically caused it, the consideration about chemically based fly sprays became very important to us. Would you spray your own body with the chemical fly sprays every day? We did research and found the Zephyr’s Garden products to be appealing.
Finally, as a barefoot horse trimmer, I frequently encountered horses with thrush problems. Previously, my only recommended solutions were chemically based, and usually contained stains and chemicals that I didn’t really want to get on my own hands. Then, I had a client with a horse who had bad thrush. 4 weeks later, the thrush was gone, and she made no changes in husbandry or diet. All she did was clean the hooves and apply the Zephyr’s Garden Thrush and Hoof Fungus Spray. I was sold and immediately purchase some products for our farm.
For the rest of the summer, we used only the Zephyr’s Garden fly spray, and it worked. Anna and I have been thrilled with the products. They are non-toxic, we don’t worry about the kids handling the spray bottles, and THEY WORK! Also, the customer service is excellent – if you send an email, you will get a prompt response from Georgette, the owner of the company. As a small business, I like to support other small businesses whenever possible, especially if the PRODUCT WORKS! In fact, we were so frequently telling everyone about how happy we were, we decided to become a local dealer for the products. We don’t have plans to open a tack shop, but we support what we believe in, and in this case, it just makes sense to help spread the word.
You can view our Equine Products page to see what other products we fully support.
