Breeding wisdom

[attwoode]

I've really enjoyed reading the thoughtful responses!

I'm bumping this back to the top one more time to see if I can get some of the other breeders to share their wisdom. Come on - I know there are a few experienced breeders who haven't chimed in yet!

 

[Magic]

A couple of pieces of advice I was given - have the best mares and breed them to better stallions. The other was have great mares, as you can change out a stallion much easier than your broodmare herd. I do believe this and with the plethora of high quality, well documented pedigrees/breeding history regarding the stallions available now, it's definitely something to consider. Culling and tweaking your herd is an ongoing process.

There is a lot of great wisdom and advice in this thread. I really agree with Michelle too, about culling and tweaking one's herd on an ongoing basis. Breeding isn't a "static" endeavor, things change and IMO one must constantly strive for improvement. I don't breed to make money (darn good thing, since it's difficult to impossible to make money by breeding horses, at least if you take care of them right), I breed for the love of the breed itself and wanting to improve on it. That said, we have only foal due this year, and we have 20 plus breeding age mares and several stallions. Since we've been selling horses steadily over this past year I plan on breeding for more foals next year as we'll have more room to keep any or all of them.

I'm going to start another thread about breeding, using a chart I found comparing "responsible" and "irresponsible" breeders (it's speaking of dog breeders, but it's similar to horse breeding). I don't necessarily agree with all of the points, but it will make for an interesting discussion.