26 foals, not one missed: Stetchworth and Middle Park Studs on their first season with NOVOSTABLE
Twenty six foals at Stetchworth and Middle Park Studs this season. NOVOSTABLE did not miss one of them. Paul Naughton was called every time, and every time he had the time to be in the box before the mare foaled.
Filmed in one take. No script, no voice over. We sent Paul the questions in advance, never the answers.
Stetchworth and Middle Park Studs
Stetchworth sits about four miles out of Newmarket, on the Dullingham road. Studs and training yards have shaped the village since the nineteenth century, for the obvious reason: the heath is next door. Stetchworth and Middle Park Studs is run there by the Gredley family, and it breeds to race as much as it breeds to sell. The homebred Wimbledon Hawkeye took the Group 2 Juddmonte Royal Lodge Stakes at Newmarket, which tells you the level the place is aiming at.
Paul Naughton manages the operation for the family. Around 40 mares, and a foaling season that runs through the coldest, shortest, most thinly staffed weeks of the year.
I'm Paul Naughton, the manager at Stetchworth and Middle Park Studs for the Gredley family. We're based just outside Newmarket and Dullingham. We have roughly around 40 mares.
Why he went looking for something else
The problem was never the foalings anyone was expecting. It was the ones that arrive before the season is properly staffed up, in front of an empty yard. Paul wanted cover for those nights without asking someone to sit up through them.
26 foals, and it did not miss one
I've found NOVOSTABLE really good. We had 26 foals this season. It didn't miss any of them.
On timing, his own numbers:
In general a notification would be anything from 40 minutes before waters would break to probably closest was eight minutes before.
Forty minutes is time to dress, walk down and be standing in the box. Eight minutes is tight, and it is still the difference between being there and reading about it in the morning.
Where sweatband and stitch alarms fall short
With all the other solutions, they have their faults. So the sweatband alarms, for instance, if your mare doesn't sweat. The stitching vulva alarms, they can burst on their own. And also in some cases at that point it's almost too late.
Both of those devices wait for the foaling to have started. A mare that does not sweat sets nothing off at all. NOVOSTABLE is not waiting for an event on the mare's body. It reads the behaviour itself, and it recognises the behaviour that comes before a foaling.
The mare that comes in at two and foals at three
You do have the odd mare that will come in out of the field at 2:00 and want to foal at three. They're the ones that can catch you.
Two in the afternoon, the team spread across the farm, nobody watching that box. Those are the ones that get missed, and they get missed in daylight.
NOVOSTABLE in three words
We asked Paul to sum it up in three words. He said:
Efficient. Doesn't sleep. Never gets tired.
What NOVOSTABLE actually is
NOVOSTABLE runs on TEO, an AI pre-trained on more than 25 billion records and over 1,000 real cases of colic, foaling, foals and cast horses. It does not need to learn your horse first: there is no per-horse learning period and no baseline to build. It goes live on any horse about 30 minutes after it is in the box, and it works even on a horse that is already in an abnormal state. It analyses behaviour every minute, and when something abnormal happens it calls you on the phone. Nobody sits in front of a screen and there is no rota to fill. The camera is only a sensor, very often the one already in the box.
NOVOSTABLE measures behaviour and flags abnormal behaviour. It does not diagnose.
See what it would look like on your yard
If you foal mares, the question is not whether you will get a difficult night. It is whether anyone will be in the box when it happens. Book a demo and we will walk through your set up, your boxes and your season.
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