In a high-tech age, a handful of idled workers are trying to reinvent themselves at a school for a craft that goes back centuries.
They've enrolled in a 10-week course at the Minnesota School of Horseshoeing in Ramsey. The school for farriers -- as those who shoe horses are known -- is the only one in the five-state area and one of about 55 in the nation, according to the American Farrier Journal.
Even in a slow economy, horses' hooves still grow and need trimming and shoeing, and there are a lot of hooves out there. Minnesota's horse population stood at about 155,000, ninth in the country, according to a 2004 study, said Krishona Martinson, an equine specialist at the University of Minnesota. The nation has an estimated 9.2 million horses, according to the American Horse Council.
Their own personal job doldrums provided Kim Tiano and three of her four classmates at the Ramsey school, all horse owners or lovers, with time to learn a skill that had interested them for years. Tiano, 44, came from Albany, N.Y., for the class after losing police dispatch and fitness trainer jobs. Her classmates include a laid-off concrete
salesman, a jobless veterinary technician and a construction worker with time on his hands.
Only one student has a full-time job waiting at home. Brian Bradley, 22, was sent to school by his employer, Mackinac Island Carriage Tours. He will join two other farriers shoeing the company's 500 horses, which pull wagons, carriages and drays on the tourism-heavy island at the top of Lake Michigan.
The current course at the school began in January and is about half over. The five students show signs of their new calling: blisters, singed hands and calluses.
"I used to have fingernails," Tiano said, displaying her coal-dust-gray hands with two bandages covering blisters. Then she thrust her tongs into the glowing coals in her forge and pulled out a fiery red horseshoe. She hammered it on an anvil as slag sparks scattered.
As a fitness buff, Tiano said, she "thought this would be a piece of cake."
Then came weeks of pounding hot horseshoes into shape and stooping to hold a horse's leg between her knees to nail on the shoes. "It is the most grueling thing I have ever had to do," she said.
Enrollment rebounding
The school's enrollment dipped to about 25 students last year, but registration appears to be headed up in 2010, said Nancy Duggan, who helps her husband, Richard, run the operation. It admits up to 10 students each quarter.
Richard Duggan, of Elk River, said the economy has hurt farriers a bit because some pleasure riders have been saving money by waiting longer than the typical six to eight weeks to have their horses' hooves trimmed and shod. But the owners of racing and show horses continue a regular four-week shoeing cycle, he said.
The recession has greatly increased the number of neglected or abandoned horses, many of which are taken to rescue shelters, said the U's Martinson. And farriers are needed at shelters, too, she said.
"The good thing" for farriers, Martinson said, "is a horse's foot doesn't stop growing. Somebody has to trim it eventually."
The country has about 28,500 farriers, most of whom work part time, said Frank Lessiter, editor of the American Farriers Journal in Brookfield, Wis.
The journal's last survey in 2008 found full-time farriers earned an average $79,584 a year, he said. Part-timers earned $24,091.
Duggan, 69, started the school in 1976 after teaching a horseshoeing class that was dropped from the curriculum at nearby Anoka Technical College. His students spend two mornings a week hearing lectures and two afternoons forging shoes in the school's warehouse garage. The other three days they shoe horses at area stables.
Tiano said she came to Ramsey after talking to New York farriers, who ranked the school among the best. With tuition, books and supplies totaling about $6,300, she said the program costs less and runs longer than four other schools she checked.
The school recently gained some national bragging rights: Allen Rynda of New Prague, a 2006 alumnus, won the Rising Shoeing Star award as best new farrier at an industry conference in Cincinnati.
Tiano, meanwhile, has arranged to work as an apprentice with a New York farrier for about a year before trying to go it alone.
She said New York is short on farriers, most of whom are in their mid-50s or older, she said.
Despite the toll on her hands and fingernails, she said she loves the work.
"It's an art to spin those tools around," she said.
"You have to know how to use that anvil thing."
Jim Adams • 612-673-7658
