New York-bred Usha closed out her three-year-old season with an exclamation point: a grade 1 win. On Dec. 28, she captured the La Brea Stakes presented by Don Julio (G1) at Santa Anita Park for Michael E. Pegram, Karl Watson, and Paul Weitman. Bred by Kristen and Matt Esler and Jeff Raine, she is the first grade 1 winner for the Eslers’ Thirty Year Farm, a few miles from Saratoga.
The Eslers have loved New York racing for years. “My very first business was selling T-shirts at ten different locations around the Saratoga flat track as a kid,” said Matt. “I grew up just south of Saratoga in the Albany area, and Kris and I have been together since our college days. From our earliest days that’s where we were spending our August. We kind of both fell in love with the equine space then and weren’t really sure; at some point we knew we’d like to be involved somehow.”
For their thirtieth anniversary, they purchased a breeding farm. Matt said, “It was just a nice confluence of events of a unique property, which is Thirty Year Farm, that had previously been Stepwise Farm with Joan and Bill Wilmot, who had a long history in New York racing.” The Eslers enlisted the help of Empire State mainstay Joe McMahon and had a “serendipitous meeting of our farm manager-slash-consultant, Jeff Raine, who ran Chester Broman’s operation for 15 years,” adding that “it all kind of came together. It’s not only helped shorten our learning curve but made our entry into the breeding business make a little more sense than if we had just rolled the dice on our own.” Kristen noted that Thirty Year Farm has bred 28 foals that are now three or older, 13 of whom have won: a 46 percent strike rate.
At the 2018 Keeneland November sale, the Eslers purchased Usha’s dam, Animal Appeal (by Leroidesanimaux), for $35,000. Animal Appeal foaling Usha was quite the event. “There was another horse next to her that was foaling,” Kristen recalled, “and I thought for sure Animal Appeal was going to go that night. She has always been not interested in our help, and she was very independent and I just kept looking at her thinking, she’s going to go; she’s going to go. And she didn’t.
“So, we go in the next morning to feed her; she eats all her grain, which usually if they’re about to deliver, they’re not going to eat their grain, and she is raring to go and wants to get out. We took her out and it had to be 20 minutes—we see a second face in the field. She went to the run-in shed and delivered Usha outside. And that is the only one that we’ve ever had deliver outside because we’ve got somebody’s eyes on them, we have cameras, it’s just she was going to have nothing to do with us.” Usha sold for $30,000 at the 2023 Fasig-Tipton New York-bred Yearling Sale in Saratoga; she was pinhooked for $600,000 at Ocala Breeders’ Sale of Two-Year-Olds in Training the following year.
Thirty Year Farm plans to keep some homebreds going forward. Matt recalled, “It was part of what informed both of our thinking on, listen, we know what we have. We have a beautiful facility; we have great partners. We will take that risk ourselves if we don’t like what they’re going to bring at market, and we’ll either take them through as two-year-olds or we will try to. We might raise them, but it just opened our eyes that we have more options than just selling them for whatever we can get at that moment.”
Usha failed to win in four starts at two, running second twice; she broke her maiden July 27, 2025, then won the La Brea three starts later. Kristen had unanticipated cervical spinal surgery, so the Eslers were unable to attend the La Brea. “I’ve often said in the time that we’ve been in the business, it’s just like, you handle the tough times, and you wait for those times,” she shared. “It was frustrating for me not to be able to jump up and down and scream and yell and clap. But that’s the way it went. And it was still just so much fun to watch. Her finish was unbelievable.”
