Maryland leads way in overseas marketplace

You could feel the world getting smaller as Jay Bang, an enterprising bloodstock agent from South Korea, spoke at an equine export seminar sponsored by the Maryland Department of Agriculture (MDA) on January 26.

Here’s how horse racing and breeding is conducted in South Korea today, Bang told the group. And here’s how your horses might fit in.

Marketing to overseas countries isn’t a big part of the U.S. horse economy—yet. But it is growing, and Maryland has been at the forefront, thanks in part to a working alliance between local horsepeople, the Maryland Horse Breeders Association (MHBA) and state government.
Errol Small, chief of marketing for the MDA, recalled his initial conversation, back in 1996, with Maryland breeder and former MHBA president Mike Pons on the subject of exporting horses to South Korea: “He thought we were nuts,” said Small.

Pons, who has since become a veteran of two trade-related trips, to Russia and South Korea, today speaks with awe of the common bonds among horsepeople in various countries. “Russia has a horse tradition that goes back long before our country existed,” said Pons. “It really comes home to you, when you travel to these countries, the ways in which we essentially speak the same language.”

Part of the MDA’s mission is to expand exports of Maryland products, explained the MDA’s director of international marketing, Nancy Wallace. The state agency has focused on equine exports as one of Maryland’s niche products. “We began looking at the Japanese market in 1995, and it was a learning experience,” said the MDA’s international marketing specialist Marilyn Bassford.

South Korea was the first. Since 2001, the MDA has been working to further trade with Russia, and last year the agency began looking into “the Philippines, Australia and beyond,” said Bassford.

Efforts are underway to make Baltimore-Washington Airport a port of embarkation, which would greatly simplify the process of shipping horses overseas from this region. Currently, there are only three such ports in the U.S.—in New York, Florida and California.

The poster horse for foreign exports currently is the filly Moon Thistle, a Pennsylvania-bred daughter of Malibu Moon purchased for $4,000 as a 2-year-old at Fasig-Tipton’s 2003 February Mixed sale at Timonium. Moon Thistle became a sensation last year in Russia, as the first filly since 1939 to win the Moscow Derby. She also won the Russian Oaks to become only the fourth filly in history to win both races.

Moon Thistle’s purchaser, Alexander Khait, learned about the Maryland auction after contacting Bassford. Now Khait reportedly is organizing a group of owners to form a Russian Jockey Club.

Act locally, think globally, could become a new motto for breeders within our corner of the world.