School Spotlight: Kentucky Horseshoeing School

When Mitch Taylor, CJF, AWCF, APF, took ownership of Kentucky Horseshoeing School back in 1989, the school was operating out of a ramshackle building 12 miles off the nearest highway and Mitch, a successful farrier, was coming off a career-altering back injury. 

But he had a vision.

“I wanted to bring some standardization to the industry,” says Mitch, who, at the time, was pursuing his master’s degree in animal science at the University of Kentucky, assisting Dr. James Rooney, one of the premier experts in the field of equine lameness and anatomy. 

As Mitch began to understand the damage untrained farriers were causing to horses, he wanted to stop that trend. “I decided I was going to jump in, get a loan, buy 40 acres, and build a proper school.”

Over the next 35 years, Mitch and his team built KHS into one of the top schools in the U.S., with hundreds of successful graduates and a string of accomplishments. 

KHS alumni include three coaches and 10 members of national teams, two heads of podiatry at veterinary schools, eight recipients of the American Farriers Journal Rising Shoeing Star award, and farriers for the USA and Tokyo Olympic teams, USA Show Jumping Team, USA Endurance Riding Team, and Kentucky Derby champions. 

“I figured this trade deserves the proper training, just like any other,” says Mitch. “We just decided that if we offer good farrier education, and can back it up with results, we're good. And that's what we're doing.”

Mitch Taylor, the school’s director for the past 30 years, sat down to give us the inside scoop on the Kentucky Horseshoeing School and their unique approach to training farriers. Here’s what he had to say. 

You’ve had a lot of award-winning and elite farriers come out of KHS. What’s the secret to training so many successful farriers? 
Our goal is to teach kids to think for themselves, That way we can give them the opportunity to get into a situation where they don't know what's going on, and they can break it down and figure out, “Ah, okay, this is what's going on, and this is what I've gotta do. And if that doesn't work, I can try this instead.”

It’s clear you’re passionate about farriery. Why do you believe it’s so important?
When I ask veterinarians what’s causing the majority of lameness in horses, they tell me it’s unskilled hoofcare. That’s what our school is here to change. Without good training, farriers start out by injuring horses for a couple of years until they learn how to do it right. We need to stop this. Farriers need to go to school, do an apprenticeship, and then, when they’re ready, hang out their shingle—so they know how to do it, and they’re not going to injure horses. That’s what our curriculum is all about—we help students build a strong foundation for being a good farrier that’s skilled in hoofcare.

KHS programs are longer than what a lot of horseshoeing schools offer. Can you talk about why that is?
I tell people, ‘What we do as farriers is we take this rigid shoe and we try to attach it to this dynamic foot that’s changing constantly.’ That's the key—to marry this rigid shoe to the foot, so it can do its job comfortably and not interfere with the basic physiology and function of the foot. That’s a big job. I’ve realized that nine weeks, or even 12 weeks, is not nearly enough time to teach that. We could teach all the basics in a short course, but it wouldn’t really last. With our students here for nine months, we go over and over and over it, and by the end, it stays.
 

What about mentorships? Do you feel those are important? 
Absolutely. Mentorships are critical. Our graduates will come out of school knowing how to shoe a normal horse, they’ll know how to adjust for variations on a normal horse, they'll know how to make and apply sliding plates, they'll know what laminitis is, all of that. But in the year or two that they're going to work with their mentor, they’re going to be able to see a chronic or an acute, laminated horse go through the whole process, and they're going to see the end result of what we're talking about. That's when we see a lot of light bulbs go on. ‘Ah, that's what Mitch was talking about back in school.’ 

What do you feel is the advantage to coming to a school to learn farriery, vs. just learning it directly from a mentor?
So the difference is, if you come to our school, you’re going to get both a practical education and a theoretical understanding of why we do what we do. We make sure you know all of the underpinning basic elements—you know how to use your nipper, knife, and rasp; you know how to sharpen a knife; you know how to trim a foot balance; you know what balance is; you can define what medial-lateral balance is; you can look at X rays. And not only do you understand how to use an aluminum shoe, but you understand that aluminum is a non-ferrous metal, and it's non-magnetic, and it has a melted temperature half of steel, and it's more microscopically porous, so that's why we use it for glue. 

I feel that the correct way to learn this trade is to go to a good school, get good background information on the theory of why we do what we do, and good training on the basic core skills, and then follow that up with a paid mentorship or apprenticeship.

How do you prepare students for the business aspect of being a professional farrier?
We know we need to teach our students good business acumen, so we spend the last four to six weeks of our program on business. We teach them all about the different types of business taxes, they have to write a business plan, we have business experts come in to talk to them—so when they leave, they know how much it costs to go to work. If they make $200 to shoe a horse, they know how much they really make and how much it costs to shoe that horse. And hopefully, they’re thinking about retirement from the first horse they shoe.
 

Being a farrier is physically taxing. Your own farrier career was cut short by an injury. How do you equip your students to navigate that part of the work?
Well, from a safety point of view, we teach them the proper techniques. We also teach them that it’s the responsibility of the horse owner to provide a safe animal to work on. And we teach them not to get under dangerous animals. On top of that, we teach basic life and business skills along with complementary trade skills in welding. This way, if they get injured, they can more easily transition into a complementary trade. Our newly renovated welding lab will play a key role in helping students expand their skills, and, by the way, Mustad was a major sponsor of that lab. 
 

What’s the most fulfilling part of the work you do at KHS?
It's so cool to shoe a horse and have him win a race. But do you know how cool it is to teach somebody and see him years later at an event, and they’ve got a truck and a family, and they're making lots of money, and they come up to and make a special point to thank you? That's special. It's so special.

Any upcoming plans for KHS? What do you see in the future? 
One of the things I've always wanted to do is to have entrance requirements that are more stringent, so people don't come here searching to discover whether they want to do this as a career. I’d also like to bump up our nine-month program to 12 months. And I'd like to add a formalized welding module, so students will actually learn how to work with a TIG welder and do different welding processes. Now that we’ve finished the renovation of our welding lab (which Mustad helped sponsor), we are ready to do that. 

I also knew a long time ago I needed to make sure this school wasn’t just about Mitch Taylor. I want this to be the Harvard of horseshoeing schools. That’s why we hire skilled instructors that are trained to teach, and it’s why we bring in so many highly qualified guest lecturers from different sectors of the industry. If I'm the only person students hear from in this horseshoeing school, I haven't done them justice.