“The Better the Breeding, the Easier the Training”
This is the motto of a true veteran of Warmblood breeding at its finest.
Jean Brinkman, of Valhalla Farm in Wellborn, Florida, boasts nearly forty years of building a successful breeding business, campaigning the Trakehner horse and raising and selling hundreds of Warmblood sport horses to both amateurs and professionals. Her success today, however, didn’t come easily back in the 1970s and 80s.
By Eileen Krause
No Deep Pockets There’s the old adage, “The way to make a small fortune with horses is to start out with a large fortune.” For every rule there is an exception, and that exception began in the late 1960s with Jean, horse crazy since childhood. She found herself drawn to dressage after witnessing a beautiful performance by famous circus trainer, Dorita Konyot Humphries, a petite woman, easily maneuvering a large horse in classical dressage. At the time, U.S. dressage was in its infancy. When Jean read a book entitled The World of Dressage
by Neil Ffrench Blake, inside she discovered a picture of Elena Petushkova riding a gorgeous stallion, Pepel, of a breed she couldn’t pronounce—a Trakehner, a Warmblood breed—whatever that is. At 5’8”, Jean was attracted to this larger, noble-looking horse. Upon researching the breed, she learned that Trakehners were driven to near extinction in World War II. They became a horse without a country in a country where each locale proudly proclaimed its own breed of horses. The Trakehner, during that time, was a horse no one wanted. When Trakehnen, the state breeding farm, was taken by Russia, Trakehners struggled to survive. Jean was already breeding Arabians and had two
very young children along with a husband who honestly admitted he was not fond of horses. Plus her family lived in Florida. “Warmbloods would never survive the heat of Florida,” she was told. Jean faced a serious challenge to figure out how to make her passion come true with very little funding and support.
Trial and Error So in 1972, Jean’s search led her to Virginia where she bought her first Trakehner. Unfortunately, she soon learned that his temperament was not suitable for her purposes. She traded him back to his previous owners for three horses:
Jean Brinkman says hello to a foal. Photo by Shannon Brinkman
a broodmare named Lotus, a yearling Preussenwind who would become her first FEI horse and the stallion Artic. Over time, Jean recognized that Artic was more suitable
for producing hunters or jumpers and did not fit her goals for dressage, but he taught her an early and invaluable lesson about the essence of breeding.
n Guideline #1: Be honest with yourself and define your goals. Thus Artic was sold. Jean realized that to sell her horses, she needed a place
to register them to keep track of bloodlines. In 1974, Jean and a dozen other dedicated breeders from across North America organized the American Trakehner Association (ATA), a public registry. Through those early years, Jean struggled to develop
her breeding herd. There were no Trakehner stallions in the seven surrounding states and shipped semen was not allowed in the ATA at that time. One day at an ATA meeting, Jean met Ulrich Schmitz
from Canada. Ulrich came from a family of long-standing breeders in Germany and was an auction trainer and
SPECIAL TRAKEHNER SECTION Warmbloods Today 39
American Trakehner Association
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