"We call them farms, but I tell people to think of them more as estates or ranches because they're just massive," Mary Quinn Ramer, president of VisitLex, or the Lexington Convention and Visitors Bureau, told me.
Riley Kirn of Bluegrass Sotheby's International Realty described Lexington's horse farms as "kind of like English country estates," with "gigantic homes" and "barns that don't look like barns."
These farms, which range from 500 acres to 3,000 acres, very rarely sell, Kirn told me.
"They're usually multi-generationally owned by families or they're owned by the billionaire crowd from around the world, like Sheikh Mohammed [of Dubai] or Prince Abdullah from Saudi Arabia."