Editor’s Note: American Farriers Journal is celebrating its 50th anniversary and we’re reflecting on the relationships and partnerships we’ve forged, the milestones and the lessons we’ve learned along the way. In the famed Christmas movie “It’s a Wonderful Life,” protagonist George Bailey gets to see, via a dramatic intervention by an angel named Clarence Oddbody, what the world might have been like had he never been born. International Horseshoeing Hall of Fame member Bob Smith, founder and instructor of Pacific Coast Horseshoeing School, offers his thoughts on what the farrier industry would be like if it never existed.

Before Henry Heymering published the first American Farriers Journal (AFJ), the only information you ever had was something you might’ve heard someone say. When you went to a clinic or event, nobody would speak to you unless you knew them.

I remember feeling alone, shoeing horses as a one-guy outfit with no way to get information. When AFJ came out, what was interesting for me was that I realized that some of the issues I was having were something that everybody was having. It was more of a brotherhood than just me making all these little mistakes and wondering what I was doing wrong and right. It sort of brought things into focus for me.

American Farriers Journal united the farrier industry through education and professionalism, says Bob Smith of Pacific Coast Horseshoeing School. Image: Institute for Justice

I met Henry, and we talked a little about that for a while. From then on, it united the entire farriery industry for those who take the Journal. You see conversations at the International Hoof-Care Summit about AFJ’s articles. The education is phenomenal. There was no other place to get information, except when the Journal started coming out. Farriers are isolated. Farriery and the camaraderie of our trade increased tenfold, easily.

Without AFJ, we’d all be doing the same thing over and over again, and a lot of times, not knowing why. You just go out and shoe every horse the same way. We wouldn’t know what’s going on. Without the Journal, there’s no way that I would know what Dave Farley thinks of balance, or Roy Bloom, or anybody else in the industry. It just lets us know that the rest of the world is doing the same thing that we’re doing. It took away the loneliness of being able to try to reinvent the wheel every day as an individual farrier without any checks and balances.

We’d just be back doing little one-man outfits, just shoeing horses almost the same way. If you had a lameness problem and you tried to figure it out yourself, you couldn’t go to the Journal and realize that 35 other people experienced the same problem, and this is the resolution. It’s brought everybody together. We’ve realized we’re not just one-man outfits out by ourselves.

AFJ also led to improved professionalism. There’s a lot of professionalism today. You can see a difference in the people who sit around and talk about the Journal and the things they’ve read vs. somebody who’s out there hacking away on feet and thinking it’s just cowboy work.

The Journal highlights the idea of new products and innovations. Unless your supply shop brought in something new, we had no idea without the Journal. Just open the Journal up. There it is. The year-end issue that lists all the manufacturers and stores and where to buy supplies sits on the desk for my students at Pacific Coast Horseshoeing School, because they come from everywhere.

I ask, “Where are you going to buy your supplies? Where are you from? OK, he’s from Montana.” So, you open it up and here’s Montana. “Here are the places you can buy your tools and equipment.” These are things we would’ve never learned without the Journal. Every new product that comes out in the Journal, we’re looking at it, reading it and seeing how it fits in. How would anybody market new products without the Journal? You’d have to go door-to-door. We didn’t have cell phones or email. Without the Journal, we didn’t know what was going on in the world. Farriers were isolated. AFJ brought everyone together.