INCENTIVES: ARHFA Top Gun Stallion Incentive, Royal Crown Roping

The rising price of horses—thanks to the booming rope horse industry—provided the motivation for KH Rope Horses to take a chance, leading them to a big change in order to keep producing winning performance horses.

“We’ve been training and selling rope horses for seven or eight years and when prices on nice prospects kept climbing, we decided we need to buy a good stud that will breed some colts we like to ride ourselves,” Kirk Hostetler said.

The Berryville, Arkansas, program had been raising ranch-bred colts and started by breeding to outside stallions for a few years before finally settling on the decision to buy and stand their own stallion in 2022 to modernize their bloodlines.

Josey Walez, aka “Outlaw,” is a 2019 stallion sired by the great Hashtags out of Winenshineme, a producing daughter of the AQHA Hall of Fame stud Shining Spark. Competing in the ARHFA, Royal Crown and Riata events, Outlaw has won $23,000-plus under the guidance of Daniel Reed and Tanner Nall.

With his solid conformation, including good foot and bone coupled with a superb disposition, Outlaw is helping the KH reach their goal of raising quality, sound, good-looking rope horses.

“His first colts arrived in 2023 and we are excited to be riding them in the spring,” Hostetler said. “We think his offspring will have the ability to excel in many different disciplines.”