How This Farm Is Organized

A working farm in coastal Virginia, organized to keep a critically endangered horse from disappearing — and to keep the record of that work open to anyone who wants to check it.

Our Mission

To Keep a Rare Bloodline Alive in Working Hands

Tree of Life Hollow is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. It exists to conserve the Choctaw strain of the Colonial Spanish Horse through ethical, low-volume breeding; to place horses in homes where they will be used and understood; to steward the land that carries them; and to make what we learn available to the small number of people doing the same work elsewhere.

We are a farm before we are an institution. Nonprofit status came because the work outgrew what two people could carry privately, not because a nonprofit was the plan. Ten horses live here on twenty-five acres in Surry County. They are handled every day by the same people who write these pages. Nothing about the program is theoretical.

What incorporating adds is durability and daylight. A bloodline held by one household lasts exactly as long as that household’s circumstances allow. A bloodline held by an organization with a board, a bank account, records, and a public accounting can outlast us — and it can accept help from people who care about the same outcome. That is the whole argument for the structure.

We keep few horses on purpose. We breed no more than two or three foals a year to be retained here, and we test before we breed. Rarity is not solved by volume. It is solved by good decisions repeated over decades, and by enough horses in enough good homes that no single fire, flood, or funeral can take the strain with it.

The Arithmetic Is Not Comfortable

The Livestock Conservancy reserves the word Critical for breeds with fewer than two hundred annual registrations in the United States and an estimated global population under five hundred. The Choctaw strain carries that listing. Put plainly: there are fewer of these horses in the world than there are people in a small rural high school.

The strain has already come close to ending twice. Once on the road out of Mississippi, when Choctaw families moved their horses west however they could. Again in the middle of the last century, when a federal tick eradication campaign shot Choctaw ponies by the hundreds, and again in the decades after, when an Oklahoma population of well over a thousand head fell to a few dozen.

A population that small is not saved by sentiment. It is saved by a handful of people keeping careful records, testing before they breed, refusing to cut corners for a prettier foal, and staying solvent long enough to matter. Being organized as a nonprofit is how we intend to stay solvent long enough to matter.

What the Program Actually Does

What It Costs to Keep Ten Horses

We would rather show the ledger than describe it. These are the recurring costs of the herd, not counting fencing, equipment, fuel, breeding fees, or the emergencies that are the reason the Rapha Fund exists.

One caution on the hay line. Virginia is in a historic drought, first-cutting yields across the Commonwealth came in at a fraction of normal, and what we are paying per bale today sits at the low end of the market. We publish that figure as a floor, not a forecast.

Roughly fifty-two dollars a day to feed and maintain the herd. Hay is stated as a floor rather than an estimate: what we pay now is at the low end of the market, and Virginia is in the middle of a drought that has cut hay yields across the Commonwealth. These figures are reviewed annually and we expect this one to rise.

Two lines worth explaining

The farrier line is zero because the whole herd is barefoot and we do the work ourselves, with outside consultation when a foot warrants it. That is not thrift. It is evidence. A herd of ten that stays sound and working without shoes is telling you something true about the strain’s feet, and it is the single cleanest proof we can offer that the soundness we claim for these horses is real.

The seed line is a conservation expense, not a feed expense. Sixteen hundred dollars of grass seed is spent to reduce a ten-thousand-dollar hay bill, on ground that gets a forty-five-day rest between grazings. Every dollar that moves from the hay line to the seed line is a dollar spent on soil that stays here instead of forage that arrives on a truck.

What We Commit To

Most small nonprofits ask for money and then go quiet. We have decided not to be one of those, and we would rather be held to it in writing.

Where Support Comes From

Individual gifts, restricted and unrestricted. Grants from agricultural and conservation programs. And the placement of horses into good homes.

Proceeds from placed horses return to the organization and go back into the herd — feed, veterinary care, fencing, and the next generation of foals. Nobody here takes a salary out of a horse sale.

Incorporating was never about making the farm profitable. It was about making it durable. Every dollar has a horse attached to it, and we can tell you which one.

Our first named fund is the Rapha Fund — a veterinary reserve named for the first foal born here, who did not survive his first day. It was built because of what his death revealed about how unprepared we were, and it was tested this year when a sixteen-year-old gelding fractured a hind leg and needed surgery. Its baseline goal is $2,650: one year of wellness care for every horse on this farm. The reserve above that baseline is sized to the cost of one major surgery and reviewed every year.

Keep Something Rare Alive

Two hundred and sixty-five dollars covers one horse’s wellness care for a year. Twenty-two dollars a month does the same thing twelve payments at a time. And some of the most useful help this farm has ever had did not involve money at all.

Documents available on request: IRS determination letter, articles of incorporation, bylaws, conflict-of-interest policy. The first annual report publishes February 2027.