Contessa CK – Sold

on June 21st, 2011

Checkerboard Farms is excited to announce the sale of one of our favorite Andalusian mares, Contessa CK.  Contessa has gone to her new home in Lacenter, WA and will be doing trail, dressage and showing off her tricks for her new owner, Shirley Lundeen.  Shirley gives us frequent updates as to Contessa’s exploits and both she and her husband are in love with Contessa, as is their older morgan gelding!  We hope that all our horses can go to this kind of new home and be loved cared for with such passion.  Contessa is definitely Shirley’s “forever” horse!

We have a new website design

on March 23rd, 2011

Our old website, though lovely, was getting a little dated as the technology has changed. Therefore we have upgraded to a new site, based on a WordPress content management system. The outward design is cleaner and hopefully easier to read and navigate. The thing we are most excited about though is the new “engine” which allows us to more easily use things like flickr for photo galleries, facebook for fan pages, and youtube for videos. Who knows what technology will pop up next year – and we’l be ready to take advantage of it!

If you find any technical issues, please contact our webmaster. In the meantime, enjoy!

It’s a boy!

on March 16th, 2011

Finally, my wonderful Avelon (Wander x Sander) in foal to Sipke, snuck that baby out when I wasn’t looking at 9pm tonight at 357 days! All those nights on the air mattress in the tack room for nuthin! lol It’s a boy!

Some Personal Thoughts About Testing Stallions for Approval in North America and Offspring Judging

on February 15th, 2011

As we are all excited about the recent approval of Michiel 442 passing the first ever “seventy-day” central proving test in North America, it might be interesting to revisit how it was done previously. Because Michiel essentially was allowed to be evaluated in a test equivalent to that in Holland, he has no restrictions on his breeding rights as a newly approved stallion. He can be shipped anywhere in the world to serve Friesian mares and can freeze semen here and ship it anywhere in the world as well.

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