Until the 70s, cattle breeding among the Cossacks, thanks to the abundant pasture land, was developed over a wide range. But over time, various unfavorable conditions, such as, for example, a decrease in land holdings, systematic shortages of grain and grass, the development of epidemic diseases and the lack of proper veterinary and police supervision, reduced it significantly. In particular, the population lost a lot of livestock during the famine of 1892 - 1892. The people who previously owned shoals of horses, after the hunger strike, had absolutely nothing left, or only 1-2 horses, no more than 2 cows,
Many didn’t have any sheep left. And it’s no wonder when, during the long, harsh and snowy winter of 1891-1892. there was no need to feed the cattle: some people’s small old reserves of hay and straw were quickly destroyed; there were no new ones to take and nothing else; public for-. there were no passes like there are now. There was also rotten straw from the roofs of houses and sheds, lying there for dozens of years. In order to somehow survive until spring opens, the population spared nothing to save their breadwinners - horses and cows. They pawned or sold their last clothes to buy food, and when all their funds were exhausted, when they had nothing to buy food with, they raked the snowdrifts of the village with shovels, taking out old grass from under them. In some places in the New Linear District they tried to feed the cattle with chopped tallow and even hummocks doused with salt water. But nothing saved the cattle, emaciated to the last extreme, from death, and... he fell like flies in the courtyards, on the streets, at watering holes, etc. During this terrible time, the cost of a horse dropped to unprecedented levels, to 3 and even to the point of being rude. A cow and even a sheep were worth more than a horse, because in addition to the skin they also provided meat.
These conditions had a particularly unfavorable effect on the Cossack horse breeding, reducing it by a LOT.
As is well known, the Orenburg Cossack horse, descended from the Bashkir horse with the Kyrgyz horse, has always been famous for its excellent qualities: it was quite beautiful, light, agile, hardy and unpretentious in food, but... the periodic hunger strike and the lack of holy blood had a disastrous effect on her, lowering her mainly her height. True, before it was not high, but still then it was much easier to find a horse of two arshins than now. A reduction in height would not be of particular importance for a working horse, but in relation to a combat horse, in view of recent requirements, this circumstance was already a major drawback. In order to satisfy these requirements, nowadays, behind a combat horse, you have to travel 100-200 versts from the line into the depths of Bashkiria, where, thanks to the forests, there was no shortage of grass, and therefore the hunger strike did not cause such terrible devastation as in the sleepless steppes of the Orenburg army and the lands of the Turgai region.
Thus, every year it became more and more difficult for the Cossack to get a tall horse.
With such unfavorable economic conditions, it was impossible to expect the development of horse breeding into the army in a natural way, as was the case before the 70s, and it became impossible to leave it in the form in which it was in the early 90s, too, since this in the very near future would lead to the need to either lower the requirements for combat Cossack horses, or provide the Cossacks with irrevocable allowance from the treasury or military capital. And since neither one nor the other was desirable, the only way out of this situation remained: to find a way to improve the breed of the throwing horse, so to speak, an artificial way, and the sooner the better, but, if possible, without burdening the Cossacks and village societies. This became more necessary when the Cossack population developed a tendency to increase cattle production to the detriment of horse breeding.
In the early 90s, it was considered the most accessible and suitable for available funds to develop into villages in the widest possible range of breeding stations where stallions of the state horse breeding would be kept for hand mating with the best local dams. "But this medicine did not give the desired results, because in most cases the queens were not understood or the offspring from them turned out to be weak, frail. Although the expected benefit of this medicine brought rather harm, it undermined the Cossacks' trust in state-owned producers.