Sustainable, but provable: Polo and the new price of going green
For years, sustainability in the equestrian world was largely a matter of image: a badge on a website, a line in a tournament brochure. That is starting to change. Polo depends on land, water and horses, and all three now face questions: from buyers who pay for measured results, regulators who set limits and an EU law aimed at greenwashing.
A breeder paid for looking after the soil
Los Pingos del Taita is a family firm in the south of Córdoba province, some 600 kilometres from Buenos Aires. The business breeds polo horses and runs, in the city of Río Cuarto, one of the world’s largest embryo-production centres for the Polo Argentino breed. Counting its own animals and those of clients, the company manages around 3,000 horses and farms 6,500 hectares, owned and leased, split between horse breeding and agriculture.
About four years ago the firm began moving La Blanca, its farm of about 1,900 hectares in the town of San Ambrosio, in the same province, from conventional agriculture, based on soya, to regenerative agriculture: a set of practices that aims to restore soil health by keeping the ground covered all year round. In winter, when the fields used to be left bare, the farm now sows cover crops – vetch, rye and radish – that are not harvested for sale but grown to protect and enrich the land. Los Pingos del Taita has also planted 103 hectares of trees, mostly native species, and added wildlife corridors on its least productive plots. Some 800 hectares of the farm supply the horses with forage.
According to the Argentine farming site Infocampo, which reported on the firm’s experience earlier this year, that approach has begun to pay off. The exporter Source by Indigo, which sought grain from farms that measure and reduce their carbon footprint, paid US$ 11 extra per tonne for soya sown over cover crops. Through Nativas, a company that measures a farm’s environmental value and issues certificates linked to its output, the business earns an estimated 5% premium on 260 hectares of soya. Measuring its footprint also brings a 2% discount on inputs from Bayer and an extra 2% for its grain from Viterra. “The idea was always to sow and build the system thinking that at some point the harvest would come, even if we didn’t know when. Well, now it has,” said Juan Cruz Magrini, who heads the company.
Polo clubs and the question of water
Some 40 kilometres west of London, Guards Polo Club is based at Smith’s Lawn, in Windsor Great Park. Every dry summer the club faces the same question: why does it keep watering when its neighbours are under restrictions? In July, the club answered in a public statement.
By 2022, 16 British racecourses had eliminated single-use plastics.
The water does not come from the mains: under a licence from the Environment Agency, England’s environmental regulator, Guards draws on Virginia Water, a lake within the park, subject to daily, monthly and annual limits. According to the club, irrigation is a safety matter, as a surface that is too hard increases the risk of injury to horses.
The underlying argument, however, is economic. Grooms, transporters, farriers, vets and hospitality staff all make a living from the game, and the club maintains that those incomes can be protected without taking water from anyone else. To that end, Guards follows a staged drought plan, and excess water from four recently rebuilt grounds returns to Virginia Water through a drainage system with a natural filter. As a result, the club says, its water use does not harm mains supplies in the area.
Most recently, Cirencester Park Polo Club has gone to the same regulator with a request of its own. The club has applied to renew and vary its licence to abstract groundwater, raising the annual limit from 30,000 to 50,000 cubic metres, around 67% more. In everyday terms, that is the difference between about 12 Olympic swimming pools and 20 a year. No other change is proposed: the hourly and daily limits and the maximum extraction rate would stay as they are. The water comes from the Inferior Oolite, a water-bearing rock layer beneath Cirencester Park, and the Environment Agency is assessing the application under the Water Resources Act 1991.
Cirencester Park Polo Club has asked to raise its annual groundwater limit by 67%: from about 12 to 20 Olympic swimming pools.
In Malta, the polo club founded in 1868 has not hosted a match since June 2025, while the redevelopment of the Marsa racecourse remains unfinished. According to Matthew Brincat, chief executive of Malta Equidrome, the works include large underground tanks to collect rainwater that would otherwise go to waste. Access to enough water, he says, remains the main concern – a problem bigger than any single company – because a polo ground needs large amounts of good-quality water.
Elsewhere the same question has reached the courts. In Spain, where recent droughts have forced water restrictions in regions such as Andalusia and the Balearic Islands, a company linked to the Trafalgar Polo Club estate, in Vejer de la Frontera, in Cádiz province, was fined in 2020 by the Andalusian regional government for extracting groundwater without a concession, according to the local news site Andalucía Información. The region’s High Court of Justice then dismissed the company’s appeals, in 2024 and 2026, against the refusals to authorise groundwater use. With less water available and closer scrutiny of wells, irrigating legally, measurably and transparently will be one of the main challenges facing Spanish polo clubs in the years ahead.
Climate is reshaping the calendar
What Guards manages field by field, British racing measures nationally. A 2022 report commissioned by the British Horseracing Authority, the Racecourse Association and the Thoroughbred Group – three of the sport’s main bodies – counted 91 fixtures abandoned between 2017 and 2019 because of waterlogged courses and 14 because the going was too firm, and ranked racing as the third-largest water consumer in the UK leisure sector. This summer the heat reached the elite: in August, with temperatures forecast close to 37 °C, organisers of the FEI Dressage World Championships in Aachen, Germany, moved the first start of the Grand Prix Special more than two hours earlier and paused competition through the hottest part of the day.
In 2021 the UK Government announced plans to ban horse transport on journeys of up to eight hours in temperatures above 30 °C, unless the vehicle can regulate its internal temperature.
Brussels wants proof
The rules set by Directive (EU) 2024/825, known as EmpCo – short for Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition – have applied across the EU since 27 September 2026.
The aim is to curb greenwashing: environmental or social promises that a company uses to sell itself but cannot prove. The principle is simple: any business that calls itself “sustainable”, “eco-friendly” or “good for horses” must be able to back the claim up, and environmental or social labels have to be based on a recognised certification scheme or established by a public authority. Because the directive treats animal welfare as a social characteristic, equestrian businesses are squarely covered: clubs, riding schools, breeders, event organisers, transporters and brands. Nor are the rules limited to European businesses: a Swiss, British or US brand selling to EU consumers must comply too. For large cross-border infringements, member states have to set maximum fines of at least 4% of annual turnover in the countries concerned.
An equestrian event or product can no longer be marketed as “carbon neutral” in the EU on the basis of offsets: the EmpCo directive bans such claims.
For polo, whose business rests on sponsorship, hospitality, events and horse sales, the message from Córdoba to Cirencester, from Malta to Brussels, is the same: looking after water, soil and horses can no longer simply be claimed. It has to be measured. And, measured properly, it pays.
