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Homer Long
Homer Long is a mid-Iowa, Grundy County farmer who successfully raised and showed hogs, sheep and cattle. He was raised on fried potatoes, eggs and pork chops. Milling cows by hand...view moreHomer Long is a mid-Iowa, Grundy County farmer who successfully raised and showed hogs, sheep and cattle. He was raised on fried potatoes, eggs and pork chops. Milling cows by hand, pulling weeds, wrestling hogs and bulls, plus riding Billy, a Shetland pony, and graduating Pet, a black saddle horse (all bareback), was part of his daily routine growing up. When he put Dr. Claire on the big black stallion, bareback, in the story, it wasn’t anything new to Long. The idea came quite naturally to him from experience.
In 1995 he went to Prairie Meadows, the thoroughbred racetrack near Altoona, Iowa. He was looking for a job. He had never been on a racetrack in his life. The first trainer he met was Kelly Von Hemel. Long told him he wanted to learn about racehorses from the ground up. The trainer didn’t have a job for him so he looked elsewhere. The next trainer he met was Steve Simoff who gave him a job working as an ordinary groom. Simoff learned that Long was also a hay vendor and started to show him how to sell hay on the side. Six weeks after working as a groom and selling hay, he quit the groom job and devoted full time to vending hay. The very nature of his hay business, dealing with trainers, and studying racehorses in and out of the barns and on the training track, gave Long an excellent education. After some 50,000 bales of hay and six years of racetrack education experience he wrote this book.view less