Welcome to Doolittle Farm
Doolittle Farm is not the product of years of careful planning, nor is it the culmination of a life-long ambition. It did not emerge from meticulous surveying or a detailed business plan.
"Just one thing followed another," explains Debbie Wilson, Doolittle Farm's owner and operator. "The horses led to the farm that led to the hay."
Located thirty minutes southeast of San Antonio, Texas, Doolittle Farm covers 150 acres and was formerly part of a six-hundred acre cattle ranch that was sold in the mid 1990s. The land's history stretches much further back, as evidenced by the hand-dug water well on the property and an old hay barn on stilts. Fortunately, many of the ranch's old buildings, some of which feature huge old timbers in their roofs, were salvageable and were transformed for use on a horse and hay farm.
"We've recycled everything we could," Debbie said. "We recycled two cattle sheds and the hay barn. One of the sheds became our shop, where we keep the tractor. Another cattle shed became our stable. And the two story barn, we put stalls on the bottom and hay storage on top.
The only additions have been a farm house - the ranch's former house was beyond repair - and a second hay barn. But construction was only a small part of task of getting the farm up and running. Most of the acreage was covered with brush, primarily stubborn, thorny mesquite, which had to be cleared.
"That was a learning experience," Wilson remembers - not too fondly.
The learning process was just beginning.
With the moisture-hogging mesquite removed, native grasses began to return, and Wilson also planted Coastal Bermuda, an excellent forage grass that thrives in moist, warm conditions. Now that she had a crop, she had to maintain and develop it. Her solution was to go organic.
"It's had a lot of ups and downs, but we finally figured it out," she said. "You do it the natural way. I quit using chemical fertilizer and replaced it with natural products. I just got dissatisfied with chemical fertilizers. We would fertilize and do well for a few weeks, then you'd have to run back out there and fertilize again. It was so short lived, and it was expensive. That's what drives the cost up.
"You really have to re-cycle the manure and quit using chemical herbicides. That's where you really have to work on it. If you keep you crop healthy, you're going to naturally kill out the weeds. You'll still get them in the spring, everybody does, but once you cut those they don't return until the next spring."
It took a couple of years to completely go organic, but her costs went down and the quality of her hay improved. The regular testing she had performed on her hay found its protein levels improved with the organic methods.
Doolittle's first commercial hay crop came after approximately five years, and today the farm produces about eight thousand bails of hay a year. But the success of Doolittle's hay is perhaps best demonstrated by the success of the farm's own livestock. Originally purchased as a home Wilson's handful of animals, Doolittle is home to fifteen horses, both former and future racehorses. The current Doolittle stable includes three brood mares and their babies and three two-year-olds, and among the farm's graduates is a three-year-old thoroughbred gelding named Court the King, which races at Bay Meadows in California.
"I can't believe it, because he was so lazy when we were teaching him," Wilson recalls. "He was stubborn. But here is he out there doing real well. We watch him on replays over and over. It's a thrill."
And there are more to come.
"We've got his mama and his sister. His sister is going to better than him, I think."
