There may be life off the ranch, but any Fremont County farmer or rancher will tell you – The #aglife is “the good life!” #Aglife is a County 10 series, brought to you by Wyoming Community Bank, that pulls the curtain back on farm and ranch life in Fremont County.
Online horse racing generates over a billion dollars a year in Wyoming. A very small percentage of those winnings, $8,530,333.42 in 2024, goes into the Wyoming Breeders Fund, an account established by the Wyoming Gaming Commission to encourage Wyoming breeders of quarter and thoroughbred horses.
The purpose of the fund is stated on the Wyoming Gaming Commission website, “The purpose of the Wyoming Breeder Award Program is to promote the improved breeding and development of the horse industry in the State of Wyoming. The program offers an exceptional opportunity for owners, breeders, and stallion owners of accredited Wyoming bred horses to earn significant monetary award incentives, while serving as the backbone to a valuable agricultural industry in the Cowboy State.”
That’s the idea; the nuts and bolts of breeding, caring for, and racing quarter and thoroughbred horses are much more challenging.
Steve and Kelly Wocicki have taken the challenge full bore on their 10-acre operation on Paradise Valley Road north of Riverton.
Steve entered the competitive world of raising and racing horses through a circuitous route.
A 1985 graduate of Basin High School, Steve was the Class 2-A pole vault champion his senior year, with an offer to vault for Boise State, but he entered the working world instead.
In 1999 Steve was running a sandblasting and painting business in Riverton when he purchased his first quarter horse.
“I bought a quarter horse stud,” Steve said. “We won with all of his foals. I thought it was the easiest thing I ever did. Then we had a five-year dry spell.”
Steve and Kelly have learned the game, expanding their business to seven studs, four thoroughbreds, two quarter horses, and a jack.
”Horses will make you humble,” Kelly said.
Horses and mules once provided all the power on the farm; people still use mules.
“Dad liked mules,” Steve said. “That’s why we have the jack.”
His father, the late Eugene “Gene” Wocicki and his mom Judy divorced when Steve was in school. Steve stayed in Basin with Judy during the school year but spent summers with his dad at the Turpin Meadows Ranch, a dude ranch northwest of Togwottee Lodge. He learned to handle horses and work with diverse people in those summers on the Buffalo Fork.
Kelly moved to Riverton in 2014, and the couple got married in 2015.
She had a background in horses before she met Steve.
“I grew up in Star Valley and Rawlins and graduated from Rawlins in 1997,” Kelly said. “I went to online school, then CWC majoring in equine science and business administration.”
She met Steve in Rawlins and they started dating.
“Between us we have six kids,” Kelly said. “I have four and he has two. He and I were dating and we started talking and he asked if I wanted to move up. My boys had graduated. He said you and the girls can have the horses.”
The twin girls Gwen and Gaven Murphy graduated from Shoshoni in 2017.
Kelly is excited about their horses.
“We’re head over heels in it,” Kelly said. “Being in the race and breeding business makes you humble, because one moment you are on a high after watching your homebred baby win a race, and the next you could be at home in the barn hoping one makes it through the night after getting sick. Wyoming horse racing has gone from hardly anything to everyone wanting to be in Wyoming to race horses. In my opinion, it’s just going to grow, with the fourth track in Cheyenne, more opportunity, more growth.”
Kelly just returned from a class in artificial insemination and embryo transfer.
“We have a good number of vets, but getting into a vet isn’t always easy,” Kelly said. “Time is of the essence when you’re foaling or breeding.”
Timing fertilization in racehorses is one of the keys to having competitive animals on the track.
“We want January and February babies, March and April do great as well, but we feel their bodies and minds are not as mature in comparison to January and February babies,” Kelly said. “Dr. Jake Hall works with us and tries to keep dates open, but he is so much busier with other things. That’s what brought on this class. We could help ourselves a little more. It will help our breeding program in the future, it will better our timing with breeding the mares and the studs.”
Improving your string is always the goal of horse breeders.
“One of the things we’re trying to do better is our breeding program. If we have a good mare out there running, we can AI her and wait a week and then flush the embryo and put it in another mare. I went to school to learn embryo transfer.”
Embryo transfer is an exact science that has steadily improved in terms of results over the years.
“I learned how to flush, find, and freeze the embryo and wait to put it in another mare,“ Kelly said.
“All AI and embryo will be with quarter horses. We’ll offer services to others once I practice on my own mares and get a handle on it. If you look at the books and the statistics, they save 76 to 79 percent, but with the new technology the results are getting better.”
The Jockey Club, an organization dedicated to thoroughbred horses dating back to 1894, has specific breeding rules.
“In the Jockey Club world, they want the stud to do the live cover,” Kelly said. “In the Jockey Club you can’t have a recipe mare, that mare has to carry that baby. In the quarter horse world, you can have a donor mare and a recipe baby.”
Kelly works at Summitt West CPA Group in Lander as a bookkeeper. Those skills aid the business as well.
Fremont County has more horses than any of Wyoming’s other 22 counties.
The couple has 19 quarter horse brood mares and 23 thoroughbred brood mares. They currently have 21 outside “consignment” mares.
Wyoming currently has three horse racing tracks with ovals in Rock Springs, Gillette, and Evanston. Another is under construction on the east side of Cheyenne near the TA Travel Center on Interstate 80.
Wyoming is on the rise in horse racing as tracks across the west are closing.
“You can’t give mares away in California,” Steve said. “They’re shutting down tracks due to overregulation. Tracks in Colorado and New Mexico are (going to) shut down too. They have one in Aurora now.”
Wyoming may seem isolated and remote for most horse breeders, but the reason they’re coming here to compete is simple.
TM Quarterhorses winners – h/t Kelly Wocicki
“Wyoming purses have gotten bigger, so people are coming to Wyoming,” Steve said.
In 2021, there were 100 Wyoming-bred horses. This year, it jumped to 435.
The award program funded by the Wyoming Gaming Commission is a way to keep Wyoming breeders in the game.
There were 9,101 points awarded to Wyoming breeders last year. The 9,101 points are determined by top 10 placings in each race held in the state. A first-place finish is 10 points, nine for second, and so on until 10th place, which gets a single point.
Dividing the $8,530,333.42 in winnings by the 9,101, along with running it through the Gaming Commission’s algorithm, means a payout of $1137.30 per point. The mare gets $374.92, the foal gets $374.92, and the stud gets $384.
“Stud points are always about the same as the mare and filly because there are fewer Wyoming studs,” Steve said.
Of those points, 40 percent goes to the mare owner, 40 percent goes to the owner whose horse is in competition, and 20 percent to the stud.
One of Steve and Kelly’s horses, TM Lets Go Brandon, won 49 points on the track in 2024. Steve and Kelly owned both the brood mare and the stud and received 40 percent for each. They sold TM Lets Go Brandon to Kevin Williams, and as owner he received 20 percent.
The incentive by the Gaming Commission is directed toward the producer, with smaller payouts to the owner.
The highest payout from January to October 2024 went to quarter horse named Cayenneoverthemoon, who tallied 57 points for a total incentive from the Gaming Commission of $64,629. The winnings can be substantial if you have a competitive horse.
In 2019, there were 55 Wyoming-bred races, which nearly doubled to 105 in 2023. The award money paid rose steadily too, aside from a blip during the COVID year 2020. In 2019, $3,216,636.21 was paid out, which doubled to $6,831.221.46 in 2023, and jumped again to $8,530,333.42 last year.
“The horses are flooding in here right and left,” Steve said. “Everyone wants to get in on the money, so they’re coming to Wyoming.”
The overhead on 10 acres with this many horses is substantial.
“We feed about 400 tons of hay every year,” Steve said.
Hay prices vary from season to season, but 400 tons is at least $100,000. Add to that the cost of diesel fuel in transporting horses to races in Wyoming and to other tracks around the United States, and those points quickly disappear.
Steve and Kelly have taken horses to Ohio, North Dakota, North Carolina, Colorado, and California. They’ve had horses run at Santa Anita in Los Angeles.
Quarter horses don’t last as long on the track as thoroughbreds. A quarter horse has a competitive life span of four years; a thoroughbred can compete for eight or nine.
Gene Wocicki’s love of mules provided another revenue stream.
“Dad said, instead of killing mares that can’t win, we’ll breed them for mules,” Steve said.
Last year, he wanted three mules but only had one.
“Getting a jack to breed a mare takes a little work,” Steve said.
Other income sources besides winning at the track are selling and boarding horses.
There are rules in breeding racehorses that aren’t adhered to with cattle.
“Thoroughbreds must be line-bred,” Steve said. “Quarter horses can be artificially inseminated.”
Racehorses begin competing when they’re two years old. One of the keys to competitive horses is to have them born as early in the year as possible. January is the target month for foaling all their brood mares.
Steve and Kelly halter break the foals, teach them to lead, then hand them off to professional trainers.
The mares, studs, and foals fill the open spaces on the ranch, along with Pink the dog and Cher the nanny goat.
“Pink is my right-hand man,” Steve said. “We named the nanny Cher, because she’s a mixed breed.”
Cher is half fainting goat and half some other breed, and the name comes from one of the musician Cher’s biggest 1970s hits, “Half Breed.”
Cher paid for herself in a unique way.
“We had a foal we had to bottle feed. We’d fill a bucket with eight or nine ounces of milk, and the foal would drain it,” Steve said. “One day I came out and the bucket was almost full. I thought the foal must be sick, but it wasn’t.”
At the same time, Cher’s bag, which was extended when she was full of milk, was empty.
After a bit of detective work Steve discovered the foal was nursing off the goat.
Cher and foal – h/t Kelly Wocicki
“Cher hopped up on top of a feed bunk and started eating alfalfa,” Steve said. “The foal came over and started nursing. On the bunk, she was the right height for the foal to nurse.”
Steve and Kelly have had good success in their operation, but Steve has a larger goal.
“I want to be the first breeder in Wyoming to make a million dollars in a year,” Steve said.
Until that day comes, they’ll be busy with foals in one pen, brood mares in the other, and two-year-olds about to hit the racing circuit. The studs all have their own individual pen since stud horses like to fight to determine dominance.
It’s a niche market, but it’s a viable market for people who know and love horses and rural life.
“Steve is the heart of it; I’m the business,” Kelley said. “I’m the one that keeps us afloat and keeps things working in the right direction.”