Hi Paul,
One of the long term downward trends I spoke about in the public forums is the reduced number of foals born each year. There was a 23% decline for the 5 years to 2016. We can't fix that in 5 minutes, but what we could do was program races so that more of the current horses could compete. For the 6 months from May to October 2017, there was an average 6% more horses competing - they didn't magically appear. In order to maximise the benefit of that, we scheduled extra races. On some occasions that has meant small fields, but that in itself has given more people a chance to win prizemoney, i.e. instead of balloting out horses, we've been splitting races. The importance of punters and turnover is that they generate our revenue that we can use to re-invest back in the industry to promote an increase in breeding, but as I said we can't fix that in 5 minutes!
Cheers, David