There's one component of the Highfield Investment Group’s diversified portfolio that isn’t typical for a land developer, but it’s so near and dear to the hearts of its principals that it even adorns the Calgary-based company’s logo.
Purchased 20 years ago, the Highfield Stock Farm started small, but has since evolved into one of Western Canada’s most successful Thoroughbred breeding operations and is now home to Alberta’s most popular stallion.
South of Highway 547 and just east of the Aldersyde overpass, the 1,000-acre farm was originally an exotic cattle operation, one Highfield president Adrian Munro says was built in the late 1970s and early 1980s when the government was pouring money into that industry.
When things went south, the farm changed hands a couple of times before serendipity struck in 2004.
Munro’s father David, Highfield’s CEO, inherited a love of horses from his dad, so he began owning those of the racing variety in the 1970s and by the ’90s, he was dabbling in the breeding side of the business.
“We had sold one of our companies at the time, so my dad wanted to do something fun,” Munro says of the decision to buy the farm, which was done first and foremost as a long-term land investment. “We always loved horse racing and spent a lot of time together at it as a family, so it was just a natural evolution.”
Munro says the farm, which was expanded through the purchase of an adjacent 226 acres, had incredible infrastructure, from barns to fences to roads, that initially required some TLC but largely just maintenance since that time.
The idea was to keep it small, no more than five or 10 horses, with the rest of the barns and pastures leased to others. When that became more hassle than it was worth, Highfield ditched the tenants and saw its equine operation gradually expand.
“We had this facility, so there was an opportunity to grow the Thoroughbred side and hopefully become cash flow neutral,” says Munro, who now lives on the property. “The Thoroughbreds were something to make the facility work while we held the investment long-term.
Leading breeder
“It just kind of morphed and grew to become one of the leading breeders in Western Canada. I think our aspirations got ahead of us a little.”
Today, you’ll find 80 to 85 horses -- foals, yearlings, mares, stallions as well as retired and rehabbing racehorses – spread throughout the picturesque grounds adjacent to the Highwood River. Munro estimates 30 to 40 per cent are owned by Highfield while the remainder belong to a dedicated list of clients.
Farm manager Jennifer Buck oversees a staff that swells to 20 in summer and drops to a dozen or so in winter, although she says finding qualified staff has been problematic for a while.
Buck jokes that she’s the emotional side of the operation as the process to get a foal to the sales ring is one that’s so fraught with potential calamities that she’s constantly holding her breath.
“It's hard getting a mare in foal, keeping her in foal, having a safe delivery, keeping that foal alive, there’s so much that could go wrong,” she says.
“Everyone asks: ‘Are you sad when they sell?’ And I’m like, nope, I’m excited because then I’ve done my job and now I can’t wait to see them run.”
Munro says breeders are not only imperative for a healthy horse racing industry, but they’re also beneficial to their host communities.
“If you think about what keeps this industry moving, it’s the breeder because the money the breeder ends up spending goes right into the pockets of the rural community,” he says. “It goes to the farmers for hay and grain, to farriers, to vets. The economic engine of this industry is the breeding.”
Fed Biz
The star attraction at the farm is Fed Biz, who has quickly become the stallion of choice in Alberta.
A son of champion Giant’s Causeway, Fed Biz is the total package, selling for $950,000 as a yearling and setting two track records at the famed Del Mar racetrack north of San Diego while racking up more than three-quarters of a million dollars racing for legendary trainer Bob Baffert.
After running his last race in 2014, Fed Biz embarked on a successful stud career in Kentucky before being acquired by Highfield and relocated to Alberta in early 2021.
Having covered upwards of 70 mares in his first three breeding seasons at Highfield, Fed Biz’s first Alberta offspring made it to the sales ring last September and to the track this summer.
The foal from the first mare bred to Fed Biz in Alberta won the first two-year-old race of the season at Century Mile near Edmonton last month.
Munro says Buck and her team did a fantastic job marketing the new stallion, one who brought a level of star power to the province. Fed Biz was so popular, in fact, that he sired one-third of the yearlings – 24 out of 73 – offered in last year’s sale in Red Deer. No other stallion had more than five yearlings in the sale.
In total, Fed Biz has sired more than 500 foals and has progeny earnings in excess of $22 million.
Highfield has had multiple stallions in the past, including Cape Canaveral, a perennial top sire in Alberta who was pensioned in 2021, but Munro says a conscious decision was made to go with just one based off the number of broodmares in the province.
He says the instability created by the closing of Stampede Park back in 2008 led to a gradual erosion in the number of mares in the province, a figure that declined from 700 pre-closure to less than 350 last year, but has ticked upward this year.
More mares needed
Munro says Highfield would add a second stallion if broodmare numbers warrant, but adds at this time two stallions would just compete with one another.
He says Fed Biz was purposefully bred to less than 40 mares this year, adding it’s not good for the industry to have the gene pool isolated in one specific strand. Munro would like to see more mares and stallions, and more progeny, than what’s currently in Alberta.
Highfield sells its yearlings almost exclusively at auction, primarily in Alberta, but also in Ontario and Kentucky. It has eight to 12 mares it breeds to Fed Biz and then another handful it takes to Kentucky sires like Triple Crown winner American Pharoah.
Munro says the goal is to sell what is bred, but if Highfield doesn’t get the price it believes a yearling is worth, it has no hesitation to race it.
“We try to be realistic with the reserve we put on it, but we have no issue racing that progeny if it’s not met,” he says.
President of the Canadian Thoroughbred Horse Society: Alberta Division, Munro is optimistic about the future of Thoroughbred racing and breeding in the province, saying there’s no jurisdiction better positioned in Western Canada.
“The reason is that when you look at our two major racetracks, Century Downs and Century Mile, name another jurisdiction in the world that has two facilities that have opened in the last eight years.”
He says more money is coming into the industry now thanks to the certainty of those two new facilities.
“We went through an era where we closed Stampede and then we closed Northlands (Park in Edmonton), so we went through an incredible amount of uncertainty in this industry that only subsided in 2019. We just got on our feet and then COVID hit,” Munro says.
He says it’s been a long time coming, but the industry finally has the stability and the foundation to allow it to grow.
