Nick Patton – Managing Director of Jockey Club Estates
We are governed by the weather, as are our farming friends, and although the introduction of artificial surfaces has made a big difference, wax surfaces ride better when they are damp. During long dry spells you tend to get more kickback so in a perfect world they need water and careful maintenance. Non-wax surfaces, woodchips, sands and carpet fibre need a lot of water to ride well and getting enough of it on them can be a challenge.
At Newmarket our water comes from a borehole which feeds a reservoir at the bottom of the Rowley Mile, and we take water from there for the horse walks, the racecourse and the Watered Gallop. But in the last decade or so there have been times when we’ve used the whole of our extraction licence, so we are looking at how we can harvest water by collecting it from our buildings, car parks and so on to re-use on the gallops, and hopefully extend our reservoir.
I really do believe that water is going to become our most precious commodity, so water security, water harvesting and water storage have become absolutely critical. On the eastern side of the country we are prone to more extreme weather patterns – whether it’s wet, dry, hot or cold. We’ve had them all in the past, of course, but they seem to be going on for longer now and when we do get rain it tends to all come at once, which brings its own problems.
Every organisation needs to look at its environmental and social governance very closely, and if horseracing wants to be around in 50 or 100 years, we really have to show our worth to the communities we operate within.
It’s taken a while, and I wouldn’t have said this probably even six months ago, but environmental sustainability is now being taken very seriously by the industry. There’s a lot more going on, and we have good people in the right places.
James Wigan – Owner-breeder
I’ve been breeding for 50-plus years and although we’ve been through long, hot summers in the past, I’ve definitely seen changes. However, on the stud there are generally practical, common-sense solutions.
You have to adapt, but on the whole horses tend to thrive in warm weather, provided they have enough grass and you don’t let the place become a dustbowl. In hot weather it’s not good to have mares and foals standing around stamping their feet being bothered by flies, so we are inclined to bring them in during the daytime and have them out again at night. One might possibly plant more shelter belts for them too, to provide shade from the sun.
You need to preserve your grass and not allow it to get mown down by sheep at the beginning of the year and then scorched in the heat, but as a stockman it’s not dramatically difficult to deal with.
We want nice grass for mares and foals to be turned out in, and there’s less of it when it’s very dry, so it can become quite difficult if you are a busy public stud with a lot of mares visiting, and for that reason a lot of stallion studs don’t take boarders – mares have to walk in. In the old days they mostly would have boarded there, so I should think that’s an area where climate change has had an impact. They don’t have the acreage to have an enormous number of mares boarding through the summer as they would run out of grass.
Ed Arkell – Director of Racing at Goodwood
The real problem with climate change for a racecourse is that everything is becoming so unpredictable. From a clerk’s point of view the less stable weather and the lack of those more temperate seasons we used to be familiar with makes turf management difficult, and from a commercial point of view, unpredictable weather isn’t good for customers who are considering coming racing.
So far as turf management is concerned, you are either getting no rain at all for weeks or even months – Goodwood this year had 25mm from March 1 to mid-May, compared to 287mm in 2024 – or you are getting 50mm in one go. As you can imagine, long periods of either very wet or very dry and warm weather have a huge impact upon the decisions we are making.
Intensive watering is incredibly labour intensive on the grounds team, and we all know that water is becoming a scarce resource, not just because of climate change but because of increasing population and the fact that we have quite significantly depleted the underground aquifers which supply the boreholes. As they become more depleted it becomes more difficult for the water companies to allow ourselves and other industries to keep extracting water, because at the end of the day we have to accept that making sure people have water to drink is more important than supplying racecourses with industrial quantities of water.
Like other racecourses, we are maximising the effectiveness of the water we are putting on by using wetting agents, which effectively glue water particles to soil particles and help to flush excess water through the soil profile, and they do make a noticeable difference.
We also water at night, and in cooler conditions where possible. We’ve also put in a lot of automatic pop-up sprinklers on the bends. They are much less labour intensive and by using them at night you are losing very little moisture through evaporation.
Ed Walker – Lambourn trainer
I tend not to worry about things that I can’t control, but I suppose there are areas in which it’s impacting trainers and I guess the main one is that the British climate has become less predictable than ever.
This spring as everyone knows was unusually dry, and it was a real pain that we couldn’t use the grass gallops. Because we are on chalk downland here, we only really use them in early spring and autumn – we’ve never really managed to use them much in the summer – but we missed that opportunity completely this year. It’s good to get them on grass before their first outing of the season, and I think the fact that they had missed out on it showed in some of ours. We also missed the grass gallops when it came to educating the two-year-olds.
Also, we’d normally have our soft-ground horses ready early, and then we’d give them a break in the summer, but they all missed their opportunity this spring. Rain will come and they will have their day, but it’s less predictable than it once was and in the meantime they just keep working away so that they are ready when eventually it does arrive. Luckily we don’t have many that need it soft, and the tracks do such a good job these days that on the whole it’s safe ground – or at least it is while they can continue to extract sufficient water.
All of that dust and airborne pollen around the gallops and the yard isn’t helpful to the horses’ airways either. There’s just been nothing to damp it down, and although we haven’t had a problem as such there might have been a few more giving the odd cough through respiratory irritation.
So far as grass is concerned, when we turn horses out it’s more for their brains than to get good grass, so that’s not the problem to us that it might be to studs, but we do use locally grown hay and sourcing good quality hay at a time when the farmers are struggling like they are now might become more difficult. I dare say that the dry weather will have an impact upon the cost of feed too in due course.
