Left to right: Maddie Shoesmith (SA), Jess Beattie (Qld), Riana Kritzinger (Qld), Jan Payne and Kelly Fawcett both from NSW, travelled to Maitland in October for a workshop with Victoria Ferguson.

We were fortunate to stay at a lovely B & B owned by friends who gave us the royal treatment and everyone in the group, who had never met before, got on very well together.

The emphasis of the workshop was on natural preventive nutrition and designing VF Natural diets for different horses. We went to Paula McRae’s Macarthur Warmblood Stud to look at breeding mares and then to Sam Heald’s delightful Welsh ponies. A big contrast in nutritional requirements!

A great group of women from very different equine backgrounds, but all with a big commitment to put natural feeding and herbal medicine into practice.

Maddie is a polo player and looks after her father’s team of ponies as well as her own dressage horses, Jess has stock horses in far north Qld, Riana has Thoroughbreds just out of Brisbane, Jan is a human herbalist who trained with Dorothy Hall at the same time as I did and now has racehorses with her husband, and Kelly is an extremely highly qualified equine massage therapist who works in the Hunter Valley on Thoroughbred studs.

Australia is a big place so it often requires a lot of travelling to attend workshops, but it really is worth it, and it was great to be able to spend a weekend brainstorming with you all.

See full details of the School of Equine Medicine course HERE – enrolments are open all year round.