The following unabridged Chapter from Kevin Conley's STUD, Adventures in Breeding, is provided with the generous permission of the author. Please visit the website at http://www.studslife.com.

If you order STUD by clicking on the link at the left, Crestwood Farm will donate 15% of the purchase price to benefit AmeriCare

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POPES IN THE BREEDING SHED

There are lots of family farms in the Bluegrass. Take the Taylor family, the four sons of the former Gainesway farm manager Joe Taylor, who run Taylor Made Farm, a commercial breeding operation that opened in 1976 and now does about $60 million worth of business every year at Keeneland alone. Taylor Made is a family farm in the way that Ford Motor Company is a family business. Then there's the Hancock family, which runs Claiborne, a three-thousand-acre Bourbon County farm that's been churning out champions and hall-of-fame horses since 1910. Clai- borne is a family farm in the way that Windsor Castle is a home. The McLeans, of Crestwood Farm, a seven-hundred-acre place on the northwest edge of Lexington, are not in their league at all. Grandison is the youngest; she helps manage the office. Marc is the farm manager; his older brother, Pope Junior, handles the financial side. The father, Pope senior, started it all, forty years ago, and he seems most at home talking to clients in the breeding shed. The McLeans keep the Crestwood operation pretty simple - a lot of the interdepartmental communications seem to take place by Post-its and torn envelopes taped to the door.

Still, the McLeans have seen a lot of wealthy neighbors come and go. Both Ivan Boesky and Leona Helmsley lived next door for a while, the former at Blackburn Correctional Complex and the latter at the Federal Medical Center two of the facilities at the redbrick summer camp of a federal penitentiary complex just beyond the stallion paddocks. The neighbors to the west, over the hills and past the broodmares, tend to stick around a bit longer than the inmates, but not much. First there was Tom Collins, who named his place On the Rocks Farm; the name proved to be more prophetic than funny, and he left after five years. Then came Franklin Groves (a person, not a subdivision) who called it North Ridge Farm, and tried to turn it into a showcase; he stayed from 1984 to 1991. The present owner, who calls the place Vinery, is Dr Tom Simon; he seems to be a doctor of corporate takeovers. He's been around for a couple of years.

True to his name, Groves planted thousands of trees. Simon specializes in building fences. The McLeans, who are all modest and polite, would never say a word against their bigger-budget neigh- bors, but that doesn't stop them from being amused by all the activity. `One day, we looked up and there must have been fifteen bulldozers lined up on this side of the road over on the hill there,' Pope Senior says. `They were all aimed this way, as if they were coming at us to push us off the face of the earth.' `A lot of the farms that come in here get a little top-heavy and load all these expenses on,' says Pope Junior, who did a stint as a broker for Dean Witter before he came back home to work on the family farm. `Then all of a sudden they've got to start making their operation pay for it.'

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