Episode 12 - Breeding Logistics 101: Stallion Contracts, Semen Shipping , Mare Prep, ICSI process and Foals Management

Hi everyone, this is Melanie Smith at Silla Select and today we're going to take a little bit of time to really talk about the breeding process, both on the side of a mare owner that's trying to prepare for breeding season with their mare, you know, what do they need to do to make sure that everything's in line from stallion contracts to nutrition to planning correctly with your breeding facility. And then we're going to get into stallion contracts, talking about ordering semen, just all the logistics that go into making sure that you manage your stallion contract correctly and do everything you can to give yourself the best chance of having what we all want at the end of this, which is a full.

We've got a lot to talk about today. I think this is going to be really informative for anybody that... This is their very first breeding season, to people that have been breeding for a couple years but want to get some insight and perspective from somebody that is on the inside of a breeding facility in the trenches every day. We're going to start with just the very basics. I'm breeding a mare for the very first time. Where do I even start? And that is a loaded question that we're going to get into throughout this entire episode. But the first thing is, if you've got a mare that you want to breed and you've never been through any of these processes before, it's been a long time since you have, the first thing I would tell you is to find the best reproductive vet that you can that is within your budget.

And I say that meaning, you know, you can play at every level in this game. And you don't have to ship your mare down here. If you live, you know, in North Dakota, that mare doesn't have to come to Solo to get bred. We'd love to take her and help you through the process, but sometimes it's more cost-effective to do it right there at home. Sometimes if you're going to flush embryos and icks here, it's more cost-effective to send her down here. And so just kind of depending on what your goals are, the first thing you need to do is pick out what reproductive vet you're going to use because they're going to be the one that guides you through a lot of this process. When you're looking at reproductive vets or stallion stations or whatever it may be, wherever you're going to breed your mare, you want to look for somebody that breeds a lot of mares every year.

It's very important that these people are very skilled at setting these mares up, giving the drugs that we give them to make them ovulate on time, and this is going to be the biggest factor in your success. If there's anything I can tell you this whole thing, if you get nothing out of this, know that the biggest factor to the success of breeding your mare is likely going to be where you decide to take her and what veterinarian is going to be the one doing the breeding work on her. So do your research. If you ever have questions about or need some recommendations, the girls in our stallion office ship to these vets all over the country and we have great vets we work with literally from every single state and we would love to try and connect you with those veterinarians.

We have a track record of success with them and we can definitely help with that. So, the next question that we get a lot is then, okay, so I've picked my reproductive vet, right? How do I choose a stallion and what goes into that? And that's the decision of what you're going to breed your mare to is something that we're going to go into in a follow-up episode with this, which is going to be related to how you choose, essentially, how you're going to cross your mare. And most of that is based on your goals. So I'll just touch on it lightly here. What is your goal for breeding season with this baby? Do you want a baby that you can keep in love forever and put in training? And it's your dream horse. It's your dream cross. We don't need to worry about marketability. We don't need to worry about anything else. Okay, that's one cross.

Is your goal, hey, I want to sell this as an embryo, a full, a yearling, a two-year-old, a show horse. All of those different choices all will come with likely different recommendations if you're asking me depending on the marketability your mare the discipline all of those things or if you just say hey i want to breed for the best show horse i can get this is i have a plan i want to put this horse in let's say cutting training or training for the rope horse faturities and what do you think the very best crosses on this mare for the best chance of an exceptional show horse. You know, that may be different than what I think is the most marketable. Both myself and Ty, Don Hamm, Matt Whitman, all four of us here at Solo do a lot of advising on how to cross your mare, and we all have our different strengths.

Matt comes from the racehorse side, Don has spent so much time in the cutting horse world, and Ty and I have really been a part of all of the cutting cowhorse and rope horse world for the last several years. And so we all have our strengths and are happy to talk to you and try to tell you what direction you should go on how to breed your mare. But like I said, that's a whole other podcast that we're going to do to follow this one up. So, of course, before you call a stallion station, you've got to pick out what you're going to breed to and then really go into your contracts whenever you whenever you're looking at studs is you'll hear people say that over and over. It's so important. Most of us at these stallion stations, we we're very clear about what we expect out of you.

And it's pretty uniform across most stallion stations and then what you should expect out of us. And once again, that's pretty uniform across all stallion stations from stallion station owners point of view. What do we expect out of you we expect you to have your mare prepared and ready that she's cultured clean that we aren't sending you semen to a mare that's dirty that never had a chance of getting in full and if you don't know what cultured clean means then that is your sign that you need to call your vet that you're going to use for that year whether it's us or you're going to go somewhere locally like we talked about earlier that's something you need to be getting educated about relatively soon.

So making sure your mare culture is clean. Nutritionally, does your mare have everything that she needs? We don't want to be shipping semen across the country to a mare that is 300 pounds underweight. The chances of her getting in full are not great. And you're going to hear me say that a lot here as a stallion station. It is our goal to ship you semen as few times as possible in the year, preferably once. And so we want to do everything we can do to try to help make sure that first shipment is your only shipment of the year when possible. A lot of that goes to you guys. What are you doing to make sure your mare is prepared and ready? And so you're going to hear me reference that a lot. Nutritionally, does your mare have everything she needs? We would highly recommend putting these mares on mineral.

We are we use the ADM mineral here and ADM feed it is this is not something that that we feel like is a negotiable thing here those mares have got to be on mineral you have they have to have all the nutrients they need to make sure that they're cycling properly and the quality of their eggs and all of that is where we need it to be once again to try to get those mares in full as efficiently as possible. So that's kind of what we expect out of you. And then we're going to get in a little bit more to calling for semen on time and things like that. But in the beginning, we want you to make sure your mare is prepared. As far as what you should expect out of us as a stallion station. First thing we need to be doing is we need to answer the phone when you call.

If you call us at 10 o'clock at night, you're probably not going to get an answer. But if you call during the day, we want to make sure we get your calls answered. We want to make sure that we answer any questions that you have, any questions your veterinarian has. That is our job as a stallion station, and we want to make sure that we give you all the resources that you need to have a successful breeding season. The best time to call and ask those questions is right now. If you call the morning of shipping whenever we have 100 orders to go out in the day and you would like to know, hey, how do I find a veterinarian that can help me make sure my mariculture is clean? That's a bad time to call about this.

There is so much going on around here and the girls in the stallion station office plus everybody down there shipping semen is swamped and trying to make sure we do a great job and get orders out on time. So that to be said we want to help you want to answer those questions now's the time to be calling and asking those questions and then our job of course is to get you guys a good product, it's our job to manage these stallions and make sure that we get you great semen and that it gets there hopefully on time the way you called and requested it all of the above a lot of those things are out of our control when it leaves here always tell everybody if it doesn't get to you. We unfortunately we cannot control the airplane it was supposed to get on our goal is to make sure that we communicate with you guys, we get you guys the best product possible, and do everything we can, once again, to try to get y'all that shipment of semen that's going to get your Marin full the first time.

Let's see, I've got my list of questions here. So we're going to go in now to the contract fees and terminology. Which I think kind of feeds into what we were just talking about. But everybody says, read your contracts, read your contracts, read your contracts. The contracts for breeding stallions here at Solo are, you know, three to four pages long. And I would say 98% of people don't read them. And that's fine. So I'm going to give you the quick rundown of what's in them. All of our contracts here at Solo are broken down. And the prices will say, you're going to breed to the stallion for, I'm going to just use a simple example of $2,000 plus the shoot fee. So what does all of that mean? Because you'll see it further broken down by a booking fee, a stallion fee, and then, of course, the shoot fee.

And so what we do here is we say, first, you're going to pay a booking fee. The booking fee holds your spot on that stallion's books. A lot of these stallions that are here at Silla this year are going to book full. We had different early booking specials earlier in the year. They're done now, but through January 1st, if you booked, you got a discount. And so when you pay a booking fee, which is typically $500 to $1,000, that is just to hold your spot on that stallion's books. It's non-refundable. That's the biggest question I get. When you send that in, we process it. We do everything on our end. We're prepared. We have your contract in. We've got you listed in our system. We're ready to rock and roll for when you're ready to breed.

If you decide all of a sudden that you want to sell your mare and you don't want a breeder anymore, then that is not a refundable fee. So that's something you need to think about whenever you're getting ready to send in those contracts. That is universal across all stallion stations. Whenever you pay a booking fee and it can be called something different everywhere you go, deposit a booking fee, those are non-refundable, they hold your spot. And what you have to think of is if you have a stallion that is busy, We, for instance, with Metallic Attack, I expect there's a good chance he may book full this year. Once you've paid your booking fee, I'm not selling the rest of that contract to anybody else for that year.

So as a stallion owner, that is a line of revenue on that horse that if you decide you're not going to breed, it's not going to come in. So put yourself in the stallion owner's shoes, understand why we have those booking fees, and understand why they're not refundable. because that's one thing that I hear some people sometimes like, I paid a booking fee, I can't get it back. Well, that's what that's for. The next part of our stallion fee here at Solo is going to be the stallion fee itself. So when we say the breeding fee, and there's a lot of terminology here, when we say the breeding fee is $2,000 plus the shoot fee, so the breeding fee is the $500 deposit and the $1,500 shoot fee, which adds up to the total $2,000 breeding fee.

So every, like I said, every stallion station is going to set it up a little different. That's how we do ours here. You do not pay the stallion fee until you're ready for semen. Some people choose to pay it earlier. That's fine too. You can pay it all at once. You can pay it the day you're ready for semen. We don't care. But that stallion fee, the stallion fee, the shoot fee, and the deposit in total all have to be paid before semen goes out the door. So that's really important because if you are breeding to an expensive stallion, let's just say Woody is $6,000 plus the shoot fee, you can't be upset at us whenever we call you and say, hey, your vet called to order semen today and we have your $1,000 deposit, but you still owe $5,000 for the stallion fee and a $700 shoot fee.

We need to charge your card, which results in a credit card fee. So send your stallion fee balance in early, and that way you can avoid the credit card fees is what I would recommend. Back to the breakdown of our fees, the last fee in there is the shoot fee, and the shoot fee is something that brings a lot of questions. Every single stallion station has them. You're paying it whether they say the breeding fee is $3,000 all-inclusive or $2,300 plus a $700 shoot fee. It doesn't matter. And that's one thing that I think people need to understand is some of us break it out. Some of us don't. You're paying it no matter what. So add your fees up. Decide if that's a stallion fee that you want to pay in total and roll with it.

And so the shoe fee is going to cover what our costs are for those, all those people in the office that coordinate all the things that are happening here from processing your contract to answering your questions about what vets to use to shipping semen and our crew in the stallion station that make sure those studs get collected and the semen gets processed correctly and packing boxes and coordinating with couriers and all the things. There's a huge team back here that makes sure all the logistics happen to get you that beautiful green box of semen or making sure that your mayor that's here at Solo gets bred on site correctly. And so that shoot fee covers all of those things here at Solo. We'll do stallion fee deposit shoot fee. And then on top of that, you will pay your shipping.

So the shipping is all going to be different depending on what kind of shipping you need. And right now we're going to talk about fresh semen shipping. So if you're breeding with fresh semen, which means semen that we're going to collect that day, it's fresh-cooled semen technically, we're going to collect it that day, we're going to put it in a box with our little freeze deals, and we're going to either send it to you via a courier if you're local, they may come pick it up, we're going to fly it to you, or we're going to FedEx it to you. on fresh semen. The biggest thing I can tell you guys is make sure that your vet has a plan to get your mare set up with Desireland. There is nothing as a stallion station that is more irritating for us than when we get semen out.

We do everything we can to make sure we get you your semen on time, and then the vet calls the next day and says, hey, I need semen again. Is it going to happen? Absolutely. Sometimes it's going to happen. Those mares are going to get Desireland, and they just aren't going to ovulate. We get that. We totally get that. We ask the vet, like, hey, is there anything that we can do to help or what's going on here? And they say, oh, we didn't give Desirelin because we were afraid the semen wasn't going to get here. That is hard for us to make sure that we're getting you semen day after day after day if that mare does not ovulate. It's really important that your mare gets Desirelin. It's really important that your vet knows how to use it appropriately for ship semen.

These are things that are going to save you money because not only as a stallion station do we not want to ship you semen, every other day for a week while you're waiting on your mare to ovulate. I promise that you do not want the bill that comes with that because FedEx is expensive to overnight that semen. So we want to help you. It is not a win-win for either party whenever you have to get five shipments. Because your mare hasn't ovulated because there's no Desirelin being given. And once again, that's all to say that sometimes you can give Desirelin and these mares just aren't, they just don't ovulate. And so we understand that. But a lot of times it's just because the mares are not being managed really as appropriately as they should be.

So that is kind of the different terminology that goes along with stallion contracts. Whenever you read those, there's going to be a lot of information in there about free breeds and live full guarantees and all of that. Our deal here at Solo with our live foal guarantees is pretty simple. We want you to get a foal, okay? If we ship you semen for two years and we feel like we have shipped you a ton of semen and it's just not working, we're going to call you and say, hey, what do we need to do here? Is this something that the mare and the stud are incompatible? Tell us about what you're doing to prepare this mare to get her semen. Do we need to talk about bringing your mare down here? Do we need to go to ICSI?

Do we need to switch mares? We want you to get a live foal. We do not want to call you on year two and say you didn't get your mare in full and we're so sorry, but your $6,000 breeding fee is down the drain. That is not our goal here at all. Sometimes all of us have to just get together, re-rack and think, okay, we've got a mare that's 20 years old that, you know, maybe it's time to switch to a younger mare or bring that 20-year-old mare down here if that mare is something we really need to breed and you really want this baby out of and let's do it right here. Where as soon as we collect, we get semen in her and we can manage her down to the tee. Sometimes that's all it takes and bam, those mares are in full.

And if we're on that situation with rebreeds, just know that here at Solo, our goal is to get you a baby on the ground. It is not to take your money and run with it. We're going to do everything we can do, whether it's in year three or four, whatever it is to make sure that we work with you to try to get a baby on the ground. But you should read those contracts. Every stallion owner typically has the final say in that. Our owners here are very good. They're very much in line with us. They want you to have a full, but you should go through and read those. Another question we get, before I go on to my next question, I think we should probably talk a little bit about frozen semen because we've talked about the pricing and the logistics of shipping fresh semen.

So let's go into shipping frozen semen. Frozen semen is something that we're seeing more and more veterinarians use, especially vets that geographically aren't close to us, that are having to get all FedEx shipments or fly semen to them. We're seeing more and more of them want to try and get frozen semen up there and i think the reason is vets are getting more comfortable with frozen semen stallion stations are getting better at freezing semen technology goes into both side of that both sides of that is is the semen gets better and we learn new and more progressive ways to freeze it and the vets learn new and more progressive ways to breed those mares it's just getting more and more effective and so we're seeing more of it used and it takes such a big factor out of it for these vets that are not geographically close to us it takes the your semen is going to be delayed 12 hours your semen's flight is delayed ups lost it whatever comes into play whenever you're sitting there waiting on semen it doesn't show up and so we see a lot of these veterinarians saying hey why don't we get frozen semen for this mayor this year and usually they'll call us whether it's me or the stalling station and say hey I have this client or these clients that want to breed to these studs and we're thinking about getting frozen semen what are your thoughts.

The fact is, not every stallion freezes. We have some stallions that have exceptional frozen semen. We have some stallions that have average frozen semen. We'll be very clear with you. This stud has really good frozen semen. This stud's frozen semen is just okay. Sometimes just okay frozen semen is perfectly fine as long as the mare is lined up correctly. So don't be scared of that. If you have a vet that's used to using frozen and they have a lot of success with it, it doesn't scare me at all to use frozen semen that a stallion station says, hey it's not as good as some of our other ones but it's fine and it gets mares in full. We can look at the numbers all we want and the real factor is does it get mares in full and we were happy to share that information with you and give you an idea of hey yes this is one that we get along really good with or hey this one we have a little more trouble with.

If you know there's going to be a snowstorm for three weeks straight during breeding season it's probably better than using FedEx. So we will help you with those decisions anytime you have those kind of questions and we're happy to send out frozen semen. But it does seem to save a lot of people that are in places that are a little bit more remote the headache of dealing with overnight FedEx shipments and things like that. The other thing we use frozen semen for is if a stallion is busy and they get booked full. And if we have enough frozen semen, sometimes we can offer frozen semen contracts. So- That is also another option. BCO Horses booked full and we have a good amount of frozen on them. Sometimes we'll say, hey, we're going to give a limited number of frozen semen contracts and we can ship you some frozen semen to use.

And then you also have some studs that are showing still, like LBR Hengham, and he's going to be frozen semen only this year. It's our goal to make sure that Kenny gets plenty of time to show him. So there's lots of different reasons you'll get frozen semen for a stallion. Sometimes it's by choice. Sometimes it's just what you have to work with on that particular stallion. The biggest thing with frozen semen and i cannot say this enough is it is so much cheaper to ship frozen semen if you call us two or three weeks out from when you think you need it or today you can call us today this is january 3rd 4th 5th somewhere around there we would love if you call us right now and request your frozen semen and put it at your vet clinic because what happens is all of a sudden in march everybody remembers its breeding season and they all call at one time and need frozen semen tomorrow and that's really expensive for you guys because those tanks that frozen semen is shipped in they are big if you've never seen them they're probably this wide some of you guys are going to be listening to this and not watching it but they're a foot and a half wide probably three four feet tall they're very heavy they're very expensive to ship overnight they're not cheap to fly they're very reasonable to ship if we can send them just regular ground and it takes three to four days for it to get there. So.

Please call early. It will save you money. It will save you heartache. And the other thing is during breeding season, we don't always have frozen semen tanks. We have an entire room full of frozen semen tanks up here. There are tanks after tanks. I mean, it's like a blue sea of tanks up there. But when everybody starts calling in March, sometimes those tanks are out and we say, hey, we can't send you semen for a couple of days. We're waiting on some to come back in. And so we don't want to give you that answer. That's not an answer we like to give, but it is the fact of it is sometimes in March, April, May, when those tanks are going out the door all the time and people are slow to get them back, that there's times that we just don't have a tank to overnight you.

We just say, hey, I'm sorry, it's going to be a couple days. As soon as we get it back, we'll send it out. And so all of that to be said, if you're going to bury it with frozen semen, please call early. That goes for any stallion station you're going to use, whether it's us or somebody else. I know they will all appreciate the same thing. Call early, get your frozen semen shipped or go pick it up. Get it at your vet clinic where it's ready to go. We would love to start shipping frozen semen out right now. And then as far as contract types go, we've talked about fresh semen. We've talked a little bit about frozen semen. The last one we're going to talk about is ICSI. So ICSI contracts are all very different.

We have, this is one thing I can't say is as universal across different stallion stations. Every stallion station is really doing this differently. I don't think there's a right or wrong way to do it. We've chosen a way here at Solo that we think is as customer friendly as we can possibly make it. we want to make it where our mare owners feel very comfortable entering into an ICSI contract with us. As a quick, just a lesson here, what is ICSI? If you don't know what ICSI is, I'm going to give you a quick rundown of it. We're going to go into it more later. But ICSI is where we go in and pull oocytes out of a mare. And when I say we, I mean a veterinarian goes in and does what's called aspirating.

They pull oocytes out of a mare, they put them in a little petri dish, and the long or the short story of a very long story is they take them to a lab that eventually grow and get injected with single sperm cells and hopefully create multiple embryos. So it's essentially, it's, what I try to explain to people is it's different but similar to IVF in humans. Essentially those embryos are being made outside of the mare. We'll go into that more later, but that is what ICSI is. ICSI is something that we use in specific cases. It's not for everybody. It's more expensive than breeding a mare with fresh semen. If you're just going to have a mare carry, ICSI is going to cost more, but it yields different results.

It can yield multiple foals, frozen embryos. There's a lot of advantages to it when the situation is correct. And so we'll talk a little bit more about that later. But back to what is an ICSI contract. So our ICSI contracts are set up at Solo where when you call and say, I want to ICSI to, let's just say, Metallics MVP, for instance. I want to ICSI to Metallics MVP. There's a contract on our website you're going to fill out. You pay nothing. You don't pay a deposit. You don't pay a shoot fee. You don't pay anything up front. You just send your contract in with a copy of your mayor's papers agreeing to our terms and you're ready to rock and roll. That probably sounds crazy, but to explain what we're doing here, we want people to feel comfortable as far as from the stallion fee side saying, hey, I want to try ICSI on MVP or Third Edge or just good candy or whatever it may be.

It's an expensive upfront process. And like I said, it can yield very good results, but there is some cost in it upfront to our mirror owners. So what we're saying as stallion owners is, hey, we want to take that ride with you. We understand there's some cost in it. We understand there's some cost on our side on processing contracts, on making sure we have semen at the lab you want to use, all of that. We're going to eat that time and cost if you're willing to try and ICSI those mares. It just makes it a little bit financially easier for our mare owners to go ahead and say, yeah, that's absolutely who I want to ICSI to. And so you ICSI, and it doesn't matter whether you get no embryos or 10 embryos.

You haven't paid us as a stallion fee or as a stallion owner, stallion station. You haven't paid us anything yet. Now, you'll read in our ICSI contracts then, once those embryos are implanted and they get to 45 to 60 days in full, depending on the different stallions, then you will pay a stallion fee. We do that because there is some early embryonic loss with these ICSI embryos. And so we don't want to say, hey, of course we're not going to say, hey, you got 10 frozen embryos, pay us for all 10. We don't want to say when you use them, pay us. We just want to say when you get a pregnancy, usually between that 45 to 60 day mark, those ICSI embryos are in a good spot. They're generally going to stay put. You can pay us the stallion fee.

Our stallion fee tears up. So if you want to wait and pay the stallion fee whenever the foal's born, you can do that. It costs a little bit more. There's a surcharge to pay it whenever they're born, but you can do that. If you want to ride it out and wait till they're yearlings, you can do that. It just costs a little bit more. If you want to wait till they're two-year-olds, you can do that. It just costs quite a bit more. You can think of it like AQHA does their fees. Whenever you see there's a certain price to register your foal between zero and six months and six to 12 months and 12 months to a year and, you know, over a year old. It's the same idea with our AXE contracts. We want to make sure that you guys are encouraged to pay your stallion fees on time, but also not have to pay them up front where you're out a bunch of money without any foals to show for it and you've got this rebreed you have to do something with.

It's our goal, once again, to make sure we get a foal on the ground for you as efficiently as possible. ICSI contracts, you need to make sure you read them. You need to make sure you ask questions. When are the stallion fees due? What fees are due up front, if any? Every stallion station is very different. Every stallion is very different. Some stallions will charge you per embryo made, whether they're froze or not. So if you freeze five embryos, you owe a certain price for all five of those embryos the day the ICSI lab texts you and tells you you've gotten them. So I would just encourage everybody to read your ICSI contracts and make sure you're comfortable with them and you really understand them.

No ways right or wrong, in my opinion. You just need to make sure that you understand it before you jump into that game. Okay, we're going to roll now into ordering semen and shipping logistics. What does a normal semen shipping day look like at a stallion station? So one day we are going to do something where we actually capture the Senate videos so that anybody who has never worked in a stallion station can understand what it's like in the trenches on a busy shipping day. So if you're calling, let's say we're in March is always busy. That end of March is when it really gets busy. So you call end of March. You're probably one of 100 to 150 people that's called that day to get on the list for semen.

So our girls in the stallion office have been very busy talking to people and answering any questions that they have or the veterinarians have, all of that. Your name goes onto a list that we have that is taken as each call comes in. That list is put into our computer and it generates for us how many mares each stallion has for the next day. We look at those at the end of the day. If we have a stallion that looks like they're going to be really busy, we may, whenever you call, say, hey, we just want to let you know the Stein's really busy. We will let you know as soon as possible if we're not going to be able to get you semen. That way you can hold off and see if you can push her two days or whatever it may be.

There is so many logistical things happening in the background of that. We've got mares on site that we're trying to manage that we say, hey, this horse isn't having a very big day. Let's see if we can get some of the mares that are on site that are pretty close. Can we go ahead and get them set up to breed? Are they ready? Or, hey, he's going to have a really busy day. Can we push any of our on-site mares off without missing them? Those are things that our stallion managers are constantly juggling all year to try to make sure that every person that has bread or booked to that stallion is going to get semen, whether they're on site or shipping semen, whatever it may be. So logistically, it's like just a game of juggling 24-7.

The morning of whenever it's time to start collecting studs, our team gets out. They'll have anywhere from 15 to 20 stallions to collect that day. We're very lucky to hear to have a group of stallions that are great to collect. All of our horses are wonderful to be around, wonderful to collect. They have good semen, so they make our job a lot easier, a lot easier. And so that team gets all those stallions collected and starts cutting that semen up and making sure that we know what semen needs to go where. Now, this is where you as a mare owner, veterinarian, all of those things come in. We ask you to call the day before by 5 o'clock to get on the list. We prefer that you call as early in the day as possible so you're early on the list.

And we have you cancel if you need to cancel because your mare is either going to ovulate or she's not ready or whatever. We want you to cancel by 8 o'clock the morning of shipment. This is the most important thing I can tell you as a mare owner is make sure you get on the list early. You can always cancel, but it's really hard for us to add you the morning of a lot of times. We will do our best, but a lot of times we have people call at 9 o'clock that morning, and this happens on Mondays a lot, and they say, hey, I need to get semen for my mare. And we're like, well, you had to call yesterday by 5, and if we could help you this morning, we would, but we've already gotten semen cut up and sent out the door because we had to get semen on airplanes.

And what that means is we have couriers sitting here waiting to pick semen up as early as possible to get it on airplanes for people that needed same-day semen. They need semen flown to them to get there the same day. So that semen's got to go out earlier than our FedEx semen. And so, you know, they'll call and we just say like, we would love to help you, but we just can't do it. And they say, well, I mean, my vet couldn't check my mare yesterday. It was Sunday. And we understand that you are sometimes in a position where the vets just don't check mares on Sundays. And we understand that. But as a stallion station, our semen's already gone. And so that is one thing I would tell you is make sure that you and your vet have a great set of communication where y'all understand, you know, what our collection days are.

We collect every other day. So that's one nice thing about it. Our studs are every other day. They're not Monday, Wednesday, Friday. And so that helps a lot with making sure we can get you semen on time, whether it is a Saturday or Sunday. We know that mares don't typically take a break on the weekends. That's usually whenever they're ready to breed, it seems like more often than not. And so that is why we do every other day schedule with most of the stallions here. So you and your vet need to know. There are going to be times on the weekends whenever those mares have to be checked. And if you call us the day of a collection, we're going to do everything we can do to help you. But most of the time, if you call us at nine o'clock in the morning, our semen is gone and out the door. It's headed out.

So that's one thing that I think is frustrating to some people. And one thing I could tell you, especially to our new breeders that are just beginning to have that conversation with your vet about how you're going to manage those weekend palpations to check mares that are, whenever fails, they're going to be ready to breed on a Monday morning. But they really need to be checked Sunday night and a Monday morning to make sure everything's good. And it just saves you headache, heartache, and money all through the end and makes your breeding experience positive, which is really, like I said, our goal. So let's see. We talked about calling the day before we need semen. And I'm going to talk real quick about canceling. There's a lot of times that your vet's going to check your mare in the morning and say, hey, she's not going to be a breeder or she's already ovulated or we really need to push her to the next day. That's no problem.

Call us before eight o'clock. We can move those. That's no problem at all. Once again, if you call us at nine o'clock and semen's already packed up and you were one that needed semen flown and it's already out the door, there's nothing we can do about it. Then you're getting semen that day. Whether you want to use it or throw it in the trash, it's coming your way. So just making sure that you understand the time frames, you and your veterinarian understand the timeframes that you need to call, you need to cancel by, all of that is really important to just making sure that your breeding season is successful and, you know, as cost efficient as possible, because there's no reason for you to be paying for semen that you're not going to use.

But if it's already on an airplane, there's not a lot we can do about it. One thing that I think a lot of people don't understand is, especially new breeders coming into this, if you're bringing to a stallion that's really busy, there may be a day that you call and that stallion, you know, the person on the other end of that phone just says, hey, this horse is really busy today. I just want to give you a heads up. And, you know, you may or may not get semen. And I think people immediately get mad about that. They don't understand exactly what's going on. Why can they not get semen? They paid their contract. It's very frustrating. I can tell you that whenever those girls answer the phone and they have to tell somebody that, just know that as a stallion station, stallion owner, or the person that's having to give you that answer, that's the last thing we want to tell you.

We would love to tell you that we're magically going to create as much semen as possible the next day and there's no problem. You're going to get semen. These stallions, when we collect them, they only give us so much. They're only going to give so much semen and it's pretty consistent every day. We know these studs and we know how much, when I say how much they can handle, that means how many mares we can ship to in a day, making sure that they get enough semen to get a pregnancy and that we aren't stretching that semen too thin just to make somebody happy and say, hey, we're going to send you semen and you don't get enough to do anything with. That doesn't do you any good. It just costs you a shipment, it's useless on our part and on your part. It just wastes everybody's time. So.

When you hear somebody say that about a stud, just know those studs sometimes are just going to have a random day where there's going to be 20 people on the list. And that's just kind of comes with the ebbs and flows breeding season. It's going to happen occasionally. Hopefully it's not a day that you call, but if it is, just know that we're going to try to give you a heads up the day before. That way, if your veterinarian can push them to the next day, we can put you on the list for the next collection day. And then we'll do everything we can do to make sure we get Just know that is going to happen occasionally. I bet we probably didn't have to cancel more than five, ten people all last year, which as many shipments as we sent out the door, that was very few.

And so it's not something you should expect happens often, but the ways you can avoid it is making sure you're calling and getting on the list early. You know, like I said, you can always cancel and just making sure that your mayor is set up properly. The next thing that we're going to touch on is mayor management and timing. We've talked quite a bit about that so far throughout this. We've talked a lot about mayor management and timing, but there are a couple things that I want to explain to everybody. A lot of people that bring their mares here on site, especially bring their mares in February, and the mares may have been under lights or may have kind of been under lights, which we'll go into here in a minute, and they're not cycling when they get here.

And after about three weeks of updates of, hey, what's my mare doing? She's not cycling. Hey, we want to let you know this mare's not cycling yet. We'll check her again in seven days. She's still not cycling. We'll check her in five days, you know, whatever it may be. once they get sick of seeing that text they're like what is going on why can't you just give her a shot and make her cycle so it isn't that easy the shots don't just make a mare magically cycle there are ways that we can set a mare up to breathe that isn't cycling but it is not ideal for you it requires a significant number of shots that you have to give after that it's not the ideal way to do it for a mare that's carrying or being flushed so it's not what we recommend so the there is no magical shot that just makes a mirror automatically come into heat all the sudden that is shut down and it is just a time thing it is just waiting it out so.

What I would tell you is if you're going to take your mare to somewhere to breed, especially if you're having to travel a long ways, run your mare to your local vet. They don't even have to be a breeding vet to do this or somebody that specializes in breeding and just say, hey, is she even cycling or is she shut down? If she's cycling, send her down. If she's not cycling or doing anything, save your money, save your time, leave her at home for a little bit. I think a lot of people are under the impression that we as breeding facilities want to keep your mare. where we want to send you a board bill every month. I can tell you that the very last thing we want to have here is mares that are not cycling because we never have any stalls during breeding season.

We are constantly juggling trying to make sure that we have enough room for the mares that need to come in, that the mares that need to fall out, all of that. So we want your mare to come here, be ready to breed. We want to get her bred as efficiently as possible and we want to ship her home to you as soon as possible unless she's, you know, a mare that's staying here year round that can go out or whatever it may be. So just know we don't want the board bill from your mare. I think that's one thing that a lot of people misunderstand. We want her to come here, get bread, go home just as badly as you do. So bring your mare when she's ready to breed. Get her checked. If you have somebody local, just have them check her.

Call us if you had her plan to come in February and just say, hey, I'm going to wait a couple weeks. She's still not doing anything. We will love you for that. That is great news for us. And when she's cycling, we'll make sure we're ready for her. So that's a little bit about cycling, mare management, preparing to take them to whatever breeding facility that you're going to take them to. I think the biggest thing about mare management and cycling and all of that is having somebody that can guide you through that process, whether it's your veterinarian, whether it's us, whether it's a stallion station that, you know, is going to do the breeding work on your mare. I cannot stress enough how important it is to have the right person helping you with that because you can get, have a very expensive breeding season that could have been prevented just with some knowledge.

And so there is a lot of great facilities out there, and please do not hesitate to call us and let us help you find one of them, whether you decide to come to us or we recommend somebody geographically closer to you, because the poor mare management can snowball into a terrible breeding season, which therefore gives you a terrible experience, and it gets people out of the breeding game. And that is not what we want. We want you to have a great experience. And so I always say in the breeding game, there's so many factors that are out of our control, but there's so many factors that are in our control. So let's control the controllables. Let's make sure that we do everything we can to what I say, lay the cards in our favor.

Let's make sure we have the right vet or facility. Let's make sure that we've got our contracts and everything ready to go. Let's make sure we're using ovulation drugs. Let's do all of those things to lay all the cards in our favor. And, you know, then it's going to pan out, it's going to pan out, but we're going to know that we did everything to set it up for success. So kind of going into that is light programs and cycling. We get a lot of questions about light programs and what that means, how they work. You know, there's lots of articles you can read online about it. Most of them are generally correct. It's not a foreign subject. It's pretty simple. If you want your mare to cycle early, which means you want a breeder in February or March, then that mare needs to be under lights about November 15th.

You'll see dates like November 1st, you'll see December 1st, you'll see Thanksgiving. Any of those are probably fine. We do about November 15th here at Solo. We'll start putting everything under lights. And what does that mean? What does under lights mean? Okay, this is very important. If you're going to put mares under lights, you've got to commit to it. Because if you say, hey, I'm going to put my mare under lights, you call me and say, hey, I want to read in February, I'm going to put my mare under lights. And then in December, you go, you know, out of town for four days and the neighbor kid is supposed to be bringing your mares in and putting them under lights and they just don't do it for two days or three days, that's not good.

Your mares typically just shut down and stop cycling. So if you're going to use light programs, you have to be consistent. That is the number one rule or just don't do it because if you're not consistent, those mares get confused and their cycles get all messed up and they're probably not going to start cycling until June. And then you're really going to be. So if you're not going to do it, don't do it. If I could say that 20 times in this podcast, I would because I get frustrated people every year that are like, well, I put my mares under lights and I start asking them questions and then come to find out they did it wrong. And so with lights. Our program here is we will turn the lights on this time of year, about 4.30, 5 o'clock.

I think our timers come on at 5 o'clock here, and they'll shut off at 11.30. And so at that time, those mares either get kicked out. We have somebody that comes here. Those mares will come up to a catch pen. The lights will be on them. And then, you know, about 11.30, the girls come and kick them out. But those lights automatically shut off, and that's the key. There's a timer, and the timer is very specific as to when it comes on and off. And it is the same for the year. So that can be in a catch pen like what we do with our mares out or a recips. That can be in a stall. That can be in a very small turnout that you have them in. I would caution you in a very small turnout, it needs to be lit up like a football field.

Like if you don't feel like you are in an NFL football field, it's not bright enough. So that's why you'll see most people put them into like a smaller catch pen that has lights if they just have one or two mares and then let them out afterwards. Or if a mare's turned out at night, they put them up in stalls, but they've got to get up in that stall every day by the time the lights are on before it's dark out. And then, you know, they can stay in there all night if you want to, as long as your timer shuts the lights off at 11 or 1130. And so. If it's not super bright, it's not working. If it's just one little dim light bulb, that's not going to work. Those stalls have to be really bright or turnouts or traps or whatever it is.

If you look at our reset farm, we're probably like five miles as the crow flies from the reset farm, and it looks like a town. Like, I can see it from here. It literally looks like a town over there, and I'm pretty sure all of our neighbors hate us. Unfortunately, that's just what it takes whenever you're trying to light several hundred mares or I think there's five or six hundred actually under lights right now. So if your neighbors aren't mad at you, if you have mares outside and pens, then your lights probably are not bright enough. Let's just say you say, hey, I'm going to put my mare under lights in the stall. I've got her in a stall anyways. And then you take her. This is what we see happen a lot.

Then we take her to the world's greatest horseman and they go to Fultworth for three weeks and the lights are on there 24 hours a day. Okay. That is equally as bad. And that's something we have to deal with every year on the cowhorse mares because they've been under lights in February, had the cowhorse shows with the lights on 24 hours a day, and their bodies don't know whether they are living in China or Cancun or if it's, you know, the North Pole or they are in Texas. Their cycles are very confused. And so some mares come right back around, but a lot of times those mares from the cowhorse show are just, they're a little tough to get cycling back. And so that's one thing you have to keep in mind too. If these are like rodeo mares or show mares that are going to these places that keep lights on 24 hours a day, that can be a little bit of an issue as well.

And sometimes that's just something that we all have to deal with whenever you're still actively showing a horse. And that's something we can help with. That's easy as just saying, hey, my mare is at the cow horse show all, you know, for the world's greatest. I'm going to bring her by and we can check her and see if she's cycling. Maybe at that point, she's not cycling to breed, but she's a perfect ICSI candidate. So we can help you with all of that. That's something we manage every year. It's just kind of an unfortunate part of horse showing that happens. The last thing I want to touch on with light programs is I'll hear some people say, hey, I put my mare under lights this year. Kind of like the world's greatest. I just left them on all the time.

I just figured that was easier. You know, those turned my light switch on and they were on whether it was light or dark outside. That is a little bit like those mares going to the cow horse show. They have no idea what hemisphere in the world that they're in at that point. So don't, 24 hours a day lights are just as bad as no lights or inconsistent lights. So just the rule of thumb with the light deal is consistency, consistency, consistency. If you're going to do it, put your mares under lights, put them on a timer. Do not go out and flip your lights off at 11 o'clock at night because you're not going to do it at the same time every day, I can tell you. And if you're gone, your neighbor's definitely not going to do it at the same time every day.

And so just pay for the timers. You can get them. You can get a cheap set of timers if you've just got them in a stall from like an Atwoods or, you know, any tractor supply. Those are fine if you've got mares in a stall. Our electricians come out and install these light panels or these timer panels and they're perfect they work outstanding it's an investment that we make and we tell people to make if you're going to do this long term especially if you've got one of those outside pens getting your electrician to come and put in one of those timer panels is great and they're very easy to set and then they're just kind of walk away and you know it's working. The last thing you can do with that is you can send those mares here.

A lot of people will send us those mares in November to put them under lights because they just don't want to mess with it. They're going to be gone for the holidays. They don't have time or the desire to mess with making sure that those mares are under lights, but they definitely want to make sure they get their early babies. We're happy to do that, whether it's show mares, mares that are being turned out, whatever it is, we've got the capabilities here to keep those show mares exercised, whether it's on the walker or turned out or ridden. We've got private pastures for those mares that need some extra care. And then we've got our general turnouts that are going to have, you know, 10 to 15 mares apiece in them that those mares come up under lights every night.

And so we can accommodate any mare that needs any kind of care here. And we're happy to assist with that. So the next thing we're going to talk about is ICSI. This is something that comes with tons of questions. There's I'll hear a different, you know, my vet said this or my friend said this or, you know, we hear so many different things about the ICSI process. We probably ICSI as many mares as anybody in the country here and put as many embryos, ICSI embryos in as anybody in the country. And we've had excellent results with it here. It has been a phenomenal tool for our customers and a phenomenal tool for us here at Sillow for our own own mares. It opens a lot of doors up if you have the right mare.

So we talked a little bit earlier in the podcast about what is ICSI in plain English. I gave you guys a very brief. Intro to it. I'm going to try to go a little bit more in depth this time. So if you bring me a mare that we are going to ICSI, what will happen is we are going to check those mares usually every five to seven days because we can do that during the off season. So like right now we're ICSI-ing a lot of mares. So those mares come in and we'll check those mares every five to seven days. And when we're checking them, we're looking to see how many O sites they have on each side. So if we think that they have, you know, like in our book, we'll say they've got three on the left and four on the right.

Okay. And then the next week they'll have seven on the left and eight on the right, whatever it may be, whatever that mare's numbers are. Once we've followed her for a little while, we'll kind of know what her optimal numbers are to aspirate. And that is where a lot of the guidance from us as a facility that does a lot of this, that's where that comes into play. Once we get to know your mare, we'll say, hey, you know, the most cost-effective and, I mean, best time to ICSI that mare is right now. You have 15 oocytes. That's as many as she ever gets. Some mares, 15 is on the low end of what they get. They get 30 or 35, and so we'll tell you to wait. Some mares are only ever going to get six. So we're going to say, hey, you've got six.

This is your time to shine. It's our time to ICSI this mare. So our jobs here at solo is to try and help you manage that mare and plan out when the best time to ixier is to give you the best chance of getting as many embryos as possible so we count those oocytes and let's just say it's a friday and we say hey your mare's ready to ixie on monday we ixie every monday here at solo select so and when i say ixie we aspirate it's the correct term to use that to use in that so the next thing we're going to talk about is ixie we touched on it a little bit earlier, just very briefly, I kind of give you guys what the steps were. So what is ICSI in plain English? That is where we're going to essentially be creating embryos in a lab.

The lab that we use is GeneTek. We've had a great partnership with them. We have excellent results with them. That is where all of the O sites that we get here at Solo are going to go. So the first thing to understand is the different steps of ICSI, but what is the difference between aspiration and ICSI? Because you're going to hear me, the people here, everybody refer to aspirating as ICSI and vice versa. Aspiration is the first step of the process in ICSI. And so we use those terms incorrectly a lot in the industry. It's just kind of lingo. You'll say like, oh, we're going to ICSI our mare tomorrow. Or you'll hear him say, oh, we're going to aspirate our mare tomorrow. Essentially what they're saying when they say they're going to ICSI their mare is that they're going to aspirate her.

So just to break some lingo down for you guys that kind of gets thrown around incorrectly and where's guilty of it as anybody. Aspiration is the first step of the ICSI process. So we'll go kind of through those steps now. Whenever you bring a mare to us and you say, hey, I want to do ICSI on this mare, we're going to start palpating that mare and checking her every five to seven days. A lot of times this is during the off season. So we'll be doing that right now a lot of times. And we'll say, you know, be texting you and say, hey, this mare's ready to ICSI or she's not ready to ICSI or, you know, whatever it may be. And once again, you'll hear me using ICSI and aspiration kind of interchangeably, but we'll say she's ready or she's not.

Well, let's say that, you know, today is a Monday and I've said, hey, your mare's ready to ICSI. We're going to set her up to aspirate on Monday. So today's the day. She's got 7-0 sites on the left and 8-0 sites on the right, and we're going to do what's called aspirating her. So what that means is your mare is going to go into the set of stalks. We're going to sedate her and they're fairly heavily sedated for this process and they come in and they're going to take this needle that has got an ultrasound essentially attached to it where the veterinarian is going to go in and they're going to puncture. If they're doing it right, they're going to puncture that ovary one time with that needle and they're going to go in and it's going to be ultrasound guided and they're going to.

Basically what's called aspirating one of those follicles. So a follicle in plain layman's term is a, you know, on an ultrasound, you're going to see a big circle on there and that's a follicle. Inside that follicle is an oocyte. And so we want to get the oocyte out of the follicle. That's what we're trying to do here. So they're going to do what's called aspirating, which is where they're going to puncture that follicle, put some fluid in there and go back and forth with the fluid. and then that oocyte is going to come out. And so you're going in and you're getting all those follicles. There might be four, there might be 35 in there that they're going to go in and get all the oocytes out of. Then they're going to do the same thing on the other ovary.

The biggest question I get is, how hard is this on the mare whenever they do that? It scares everybody to death whenever they hear needle and puncture and, you know, all of that. So I would encourage you guys, there is quite a bit of research online that you can look up and read about the long-term effects of aspirations on mares and what they have found so far. The research that is out there says that aspirating these mares long-term, whether you're doing it often or not, shows very little to no. Negative effects on their reproductive cycles, their reproductive abilities. I would venture to say that the mares that I've seen that get flushed repeatedly in breeding seasons over and over again have significantly more issues reproductively than mares that have been ICSI for the last couple of years exclusively.

And we have some mares here that have been what they call ICSI only. They can't be flushed for whatever reason. One mare that's been ICSI only for 12 years, probably. And we have no problems with aspirating her still at all. And she's been aspirated consistently multiple times a year for the last 12 years. And she does just fine. If you have a mare that all you did was flush her for 12 years, enough to get four to five babies a year for 12 years, you wouldn't be able to flush her any more likely. So I think that there is a, You will hear a lot of different chatter about aspirating and, you know, some people think it is bad for the mare. Some people think it's not. I would just tell you guys to go do your own research. There's research out there.

Talk to veterinarians that do a lot of aspirations and let them explain it to you, you know, as a veterinarian, what their opinion is. I'm not a vet, but I can just tell you in my real world experience, we've done a lot of both between letting these mares carry flesh, be aspirated, and a lot of it's been a combo of all of them. And the long-term effects of aspiration, I think, are little to none. So I would encourage you guys to go look and do some research on that. The beauty of aspirating is that a lot of times we have people haul in mares on a Monday. They come in, they aspirate these mares, and they go right back to the trainer that day. They were here for 45 minutes. And so we are getting and seeing more and more people that are able to continue these horses show careers, with little to no interruption whatsoever and still be able to breed them and produce embryos on these show horses while they're in their show career, which is something that never happened before.

It used to, you had to bring those mares to the breeding farm and they had to be here or the people that were taking care of them had to haul them back and forth to the vet or to the breeding barn, you know, four days a week to make sure they got bred in between getting ridden. And that's a lot on a mare. And so for her to be able to come in once every three to seven weeks during or in between breeding seasons to freeze embryos or create fresh ICSI embryos has really made a huge difference in the ability for these mares to be dual purpose, to be able to be shown and also be able to have some babies starting to come through the pipeline. So I would encourage anybody that's got show mares to. To explore that. Here at Solo, we aspirate every Monday.

We do it every single Monday of the year, and we have a lot of people haul in for that, and it works really well. Before we move on to the next step of ICSI, another thing I want to touch on is age. We have a lot of people that say, like, well, I have a two-year-old mare, and I love her, and I want to aspirate her. That is not my recommendation. We will generally not even aspirate a two-year-old mare. We're just going to tell you no. Somebody else might do it, but we're not going to. Those mares need to be reproductively far enough along that they can produce quality oocytes or you're wasting your time and it's not fair to the horse and so typically towards the end of their three-year-old year they do fine four-year-olds do fine they you really see the embryos in my opinion seem to do better as five six seven-year-olds and up it kind of that three four-year-old year i just think that um we definitely get embryos that work but the we just don't see them produce as many as they do starting in that five and six year old year but we have a lot of mares that are very successfully exceed later in their three-year-old year like after the snaffle bit or after the cutting faturity and all through their four-year-old year so that would be my recommendation on when to start just depending on your horse and your goals with that horse.

So back to our steps of ICSI. We've checked her mare. We've aspirated her. We've explained what aspiration is. They've gotten all these little O sites out and they put them in a dish here at Solo, look at them under a microscope, wash them, and they get packed up and taken to the ICSI lab. So that all happens here. Checking and counting how many O sites we got, all that happens here. Then they get packed in to some very, very specific medium that I say convinces them that they're the chosen one. So this medium is at a very specific temperature. These oocytes are handled in a very, very specific way. They're very sensitive to different... It sounds funny, but different smells in the air like you can't have. There's...

Different lights, different smells, different, there's all kinds of things they're sensitive to. So once those oocytes are aspirated, they come in, they have to be cleaned and packaged up and put away into a very specific temperature right away. And that all happens here. So once all those oocytes are gathered up, they go up to the AXE lab and they start to be processed by the embryologists up there. So on day, well, it's technically day negative one of the AXE process. They're going to go in and count and see how many of those oocytes actually were recovered that look good and are ones that they think are going to continue on. They're going to send an update to us and say, hey, we've got this many and we'll let you know how many we're going to inject.

A couple days later, they're going to come in and inject those oocytes. There's very specific terms for that. I'm not going to get into. There is some really, really good videos on the Gene Tech website that I did with their veterinarian that does explain this at a little bit more of a scientific level. So I would encourage you, if this is something you're interested in, that you go onto the Gene Tech website and watch those videos because they're very informative of the true scientific nature of the ICSI process. But I'm going to be pretty general for the purpose of what we're doing here. They're going to go in and they're going to inject those. That is the actual ICSI process. So when we say ICSI, that is ICSI. It's where they're injecting one single sperm cell into that oocyte and, you know, essentially at that point, hopefully creating what will become an embryo over the next week. And so.

Those oocytes are injected, and they sit in their incubator. They're put in very specific mediums. Once again, they're at a very, very specific temperature. Everything, air quality, there's so much to it. It is a very complicated process and a very controlled process. So those oocytes are injected, and then there's a couple of steps that happen in between. But essentially, seven days later, we're going to start hearing back from the lab for them to say, hey we have embryos either we have zero embryos or four embryos or eight embryos or two embryos whatever it may be and so we're going to hear if they have embryos on day seven and then the next day is day eight day nine and day ten so there's four days that we have for possible embryos this time of year we're freezing those embryos so when those embryos come in they text us and let us know what they have we know all of those embryos right now are already going to be frozen during breeding season, we're going to say, hey, you know, they may say we got four embryos today.

Well, you as a mare owner have told us, hey, I want to put two embryos in. We would say, hey, we want to transfer two of those and freeze the rest. Or, you know, you may say, I want to put them all in. So we're going to transfer those four and put them in. That's a whole other podcast for a whole other day, kind of talking about recent mares and recent management and what our role is in that. But essentially, if you're doing your stuff here at Solo, we will handle all of that for you. If you give us your order and say, I want to put this many embryos in, we've got it handled. We set your re-sips up. We get those embryos implanted. It's pretty hands-off for you. You just have to give us our marching orders and we'll handle it from there. And so that is a very broad overview of the ICSI process.

Kind of breaks down what each step is for you. Those embryos that are frozen will stay in the lab until you're ready to use them. That can be any time. It can be a couple weeks later. It can be in three years. It can be in five years. It can be in 10 years. Those embryos are frozen there for you to use. And we can help guide you on the different paperwork that needs to happen for those. The, you know, AQHA frozen embryo permits, all the things that need to happen with that. that we can help you through that process. A lot of people ask me, you know, should I ICSI my mare? Well, that all depends on the goals. What are your goals, you know, and tell me about your mare and tell me about what you want to do with the babies.

You know, do we have a mare that is capable of carrying that cost? You know, if you have a mare that hasn't done anything and you're breeding her to a stud that hasn't done anything and it's your dream foal, we might not need to ICSI for that because it is more cost to ICSI and you may not need five of those same crosses. You know, you may get five embryos from that and all of a sudden you're looking up and you've got a ICSI bill that's, you know, $5,000 at the lab or $7,000 at the lab and you're like, well, I really only needed one of these. ICSI is not for everybody. It's not for every single situation. Let's say you have a show mare that's out there doing really well and you're like, hey, I want to make sure I get some embryos frozen on this mare and I want to put several in this year.

That's an ICSI. that mare is likely one that we would suggest Ixion. They're still trying to show her you want to get three or four babies in for the year, maybe to different stallions. That is something where, you know, so long as the investment makes sense and you have a quality enough mare and you're breeding to the right stallions, if your goal is resale, we can kind of help you say, hey, this is probably a good idea. Or, you know, you may have more in these foals than what they're going to be worth. And that's where, like I said earlier, myself or Matt or Dawn or Ty come in that we can... We can help you make those decisions and kind of guide you depending on what your goals are because everybody's goals are different.

Biggest thing I would tell you with ICSI, if you're interested in doing it, call our office. Cody in our front office is excellent at explaining ICSI, how it works, what it costs, all of that. She can give you the breakdown from A to Z on it. And then if you still need some help deciding if it's the right choice for your mare based on your goals, then that's where one of us four, Matt, Dawn, Ty come in and we will kind of walk through the process and help you decide if that's a good choice for your mayor or not. Um, so we're going to talk a little bit about the expectations of what you should plan to spend if you're going to ICSI your mare. That is another question we get a lot. You know, what can I expect it's going to cost?

Everybody hates this answer, but it just depends. So a lot of it depends on your mare. Some mares give a lot of embryos. That means your bill is going to be higher. So the thing that changes in ICSI that's going to affect your bill significantly is how many frozen or not frozen embryos, but how many embryos your mare produces. And then you can decide whether you're going to transfer them fresh or if you're going to freeze them. And so typically the costs are going to be, I always say to ICSI or aspirate your mare, win, lose, or draw, you need to budget about $2,500 to $3,000. That's the base cost to aspirate them, do the ICSI process in the lab, the mare management, all of that. Just budget $2,500 to $3,000 for that ICSI cycle.

Whether you get zero embryos or 10 is going to add on top of that. So if you get no embryos, you've got the $2,500 to $3,000. Let's say you get four embryos. On average, and it's going to vary some depending on if you're transferring them fresh or if you're freezing them, figure about $1,000 in embryos. So it's cheaper in the lab if you're going to transfer them fresh because they don't have to go through the process. of freezing them. So if you're going to transfer them fresh, it's a little bit cheaper. If you are going to vitrify is what we technically call that or freeze them, it's going to cost a little bit more per embryo. So on average, figure about a thousand dollars an embryo will get you out the door pretty well.

So if you get, let's just say four embryos, your ICSI bill is going to be about $7,000 is a good rule of thumb estimate. Probably a tick on the high side, but it's a good estimate. Now, what does that mean, let's say, if you do that right now and you get four embryos? That means you have four embryos sitting frozen at the lab right now. One thing I didn't touch on earlier that's probably important to say right now is those embryos are not, they're already fertilized. You've already chosen what stud you want. We do not currently have the ability to freeze oocytes. So a lot of people are like, well, I want to freeze eggs on my mare. We can't do that yet. It's just not something they've tried it.

It's not very effective. You have to fertilize those. So that means that whatever embryos you have frozen, you've already chosen a stud on. So let's just say, for instance, you've chosen time to glow. So you have four time to glow embryos out of your mare sitting at the ICSI lab ready to be transferred. Generally, what happens from there is people will say, hey, I want early babies. So transfer my embryos, two of my embryos frozen early in the year. So during February, we'll get some recits set up for you and we'll get those embryos transferred for you and start updating you. Hey, this one's working, this one isn't, this one's at a heartbeat. Both of them worked. Whatever the outcome is of those embryos, we'll keep you updated on. Then you still have two embryos frozen.

So this is where if you do your embryo work at Sola Select, you have the opportunity to sell your embryos in our cell, whether those are frozen embryos or full in uteros. That has proven to be very, very effective for our customers. A lot of them will exceed their mare, especially these mares that do give a significant number of embryos per cycle. Let's say we have a mare that gives six embryos per cycle a lot of times, and it's going to change every time, but just say on average. You know that mare we may that owner may say hey put three of those frozen embryos in the embryo cell february 1st that solo is having okay we'll do that will those embryos bring you know 10 to 12 000 15 000 maybe for those three frozen embryos that's a great opportunity for our mare owners to be able to kind of cash flow those mares and pay some of their other ICSI bills it's also an excellent opportunity for somebody that doesn't own a mare that doesn't want to go through the ICSI process, but wants to have some cool babies on the ground.

Generally, those are really cool crosses. Like in our last sale, we had one playgun and two smart chikolinas out of Smart Kitty RG, which is a mare of mine that was a reserve faturity champion. The year Metallic Cat won it. She was second. She's won over $200,000. She's produced over $300,000. So, you know, that's an awesome opportunity. I think that guy gave $16,000 for those embryos. He'll pay the stud fees on them. So for me, it was good because I was able to. Net some profit on those frozen embryos to pay for some of those other frozens that I have on that mare as a mare owner. And then for that person, what a cool opportunity to get three frozen embryos out of a mare like that and never have to own one of that caliber.

So we have seen a ton of success with that. It's just an excellent, excellent deal for our mare owners and the buyers of those frozen embryos. They've had a lot of success with it. And so you have a lot of different options on that frozen embryos is what that kind of boils down to. Now, I would suggest if that's something that is in your game plan for the year that you call one of us here, myself or Ty, Don or Matt, and discuss it with us because not every mare, just because you love her, doesn't mean that she's going to have marketable frozen embryos. You know, mares that haven't won anything, probably not going to get a lot for their frozen embryos. This is a better plan for a mare that's got some good stats to her, whether it's earnings herself or produce earnings and, you know, bread to a stud that's very desirable.

And so all of that kind of comes back to marketability and our ability to advise you on how to do that. So that's kind of the frozen embryo spill. Some people don't sell the frozen embryos. They keep them and they want to rack some up on those mares and keep them frozen where they have them as kind of an insurance plan on those mares. And that's great too. There's tons of different options, but kind of back to the beginning when I said, And, you know, ICSI isn't the best option for every mare, but it's a great option for a lot of mares. It really just depends on your goals. And that's what we're here to kind of help guide you through is, you know, you tell me your goals and I'll kind of give you the different paths to get there. And, you know, you can choose what you want to do from there.

See one other thing we should talk about with frozen embryos is or just ICSI in general is the ability to do that on a mare that has died unexpectedly so let's say you have a mare that's colicking and unfortunately it doesn't look like she's going to make it and you know they may have to put her down we can or your vet can harvest those or harvest her ovaries send those ovaries to gene tech and gene tech is able to extract the oocytes out of that out of those harvested, ovaries and potentially get some embryos created for you to preserve the genetics of that mare. That is something that has been a huge advancement and has been really useful for people that unexpectedly lose a horse. We can transfer those embryos fresh. We can freeze them.

Obviously, depending on the time of year, we can transfer them fresh. But I would definitely encourage you guys, if that's something that you unfortunately run into, you can call us and we can help guide you through the process of what that will look like to make sure that you are able to get some embryos from that mare. And then I think the last thing we should touch on with ICSI is what is a realistic expectation per cycle of the number of embryos you're going to get. Everybody hates this answer, but it totally depends on your mare. Once we've ICSI'd your mare a couple times, we will have a very good idea of what she's generally going to give us. The overall average at Gene tech this year was 2.1 or 2.2 embryos per cycle.

It continues to get better every year. I think we'll just continue to see it increase as they continue to implement new technology and, you know, everything just gets better and better every year with the ICSI. But generally, we see here between two and three embryos being the average. A lot of that's going to depend on the mare's age. If you have a mare that's 25 that we're ICSI-ing, sometimes we're really excited if we get one embryo, You know, there's some mares that consistently give us eight, nine, ten embryos. And so it just depends on your horse. Once we start checking her and evaluating her, we can kind of help you with that. There's some mares that come here that people send to ICSI and we just say, hey, this mare is just not a good ICSI candidate.

You're going to spend your wheels and spend way too much money. We just need to flush her. She's not one that gives us enough oocytes to start with. It's not our recommendation to ICSI-er. We can still do it if you want, but we're going to give you our recommendation. There's some mares you're going to send here to flush and we're going to say, hey, this mare has so many oocytes. Like you are cheaper per embryo to ICSI her. And we do that. And those mares are out of here early. And these people might have enough embryos. That mare doesn't have to come back to the breeding barn for three years. And so there's every mare is different. We're here to help you evaluate those mares and help you kind of decide what the best direction to go is, what the most cost effective direction to go is.

All once again, based on your goals. the next thing we're going to come into and this is probably a whole other podcast we'll go into at some point but i'm going to touch briefly on recent mares so here at solo we have about 2500 recent mares here we've got one of the largest if not the largest recent farm in the world and we put a lot of embryos in every year we put a lot of ixi embryos in we put a lot of fresh flush too but probably more or definitely more ICSI embryos, whether it's fresh ICSI or frozen embryos. And we have a lot of experience with those and have had a lot of success with those for our customers over the last couple of years. Our Reset Farm division includes a veterinarian that all he's done his entire career is advanced reproduction.

And so he puts all the embryos in and he is very, very good at what he does. We have an excellent team over there. Those mares are cared for in a very specific way. They are on mineral year-round. We have a light program. We have a very specific feed program. We do everything that we can possibly do to make sure that you have the best outcome possible on those re-sips. I think a lot of people say, you know, why can't I just have my own re-sip? You can. You can do that. We don't manage outside re-sips here at Solo. You'll have to find somewhere to take those re-sips if you want to do that. I will tell you that most people that do that end up. Just leasing re-sips after a year or two. I think a lot of people think you can just go to the sale barn, you can just buy any mare and automatically make them a re-sip.

And I will just tell you, there is a reason there are re-sip farms. And if it was that easy, there wouldn't be re-sip farms. But it is an art what we do. Buying the mares that we buy, we are very, very specific about the mares we purchase. We are very specific about the way they're managed. So we started preparing the receipts that all of your embryos are going to go into at the end of last breeding season. Those mares were coming back in. They were getting, you know, all of the health care that they needed as far as worming and the vaccinations and, you know, put back on our mineral and everything that they need to have. So I always say that the next year's embryos start about a year before we ever put them in.

So those mares right now, the mares that all the embryos are going in are under lights and starting to be palpated and checked and cultured today. Actually, they're starting to go through and culture those mares today so we can make sure that everything culture is clean and those mares are ready whenever February comes around. Those mares are ready to start having embryos put in. So there is a lot of work that leads up to putting an embryo into a re-sip besides just leading the mare under the stalks that day and implaning them. One thing I think people don't understand is, you know, I had this perfect, whether it was ICSI embryo or fresh embryo, and you had this recent mare that was set up right, and it didn't work. I don't understand why.

So sometimes I just have to say, and I have to remind myself this too, step back for a second and think, what are we doing here? We've created this embryo, we've taken it out of this known mare's body one way or the other, and we have put it in this foreign body to try and create a baby. When you really think about it, it's crazy that it works at all, but it. It is a very delicate process. Just like I said earlier, there are so many different factors that make it work or not. And, you know, half of those are in our control and half of them aren't. We control all the controllables that are possible to control at the reset farm is what I can tell you. The biggest thing here at Solo is we have enough mares that we can be really picky. So if we need, you know, 20 mares for embryos in a day, we likely have 30 to 35, maybe 40 set up for that day.

And some of those mares during that cycle, they're just not perfect candidates for an embryo. They may have a little bit of fluid or whatever it is. And that doesn't mean they're not going to be perfect candidates on their next cycle. That just means this specific cycle, they weren't perfect candidates. And we're going to call them out. They come out of the equation. So we're setting up way more resips than we know we're going to need that day. And we have the ability to do that because we have such a high volume of mares and that's why we keep such a high volume of mares. That allows us to really get down to the best of the best mares for a day and get those embryos put into a mare that has the best chance to give your embryo the opportunity to become a full.

We can put it in the best re-sip of that day and have the best quality embryo that day and it's not going to work sometimes and there's reasons that we don't know why it's not going to work. That is more scientifically advanced than this world has made it yet. Your expectations need to be that sometimes everything's going to be perfect and it's going to be a heartbreak. We're going to say, you know, maybe this embryo worked, but there wasn't a heartbeat. It was an empty vesicle. Things like that are going to happen. That's the reality of transferring embryos. But overall, I think that the way that we manage these mares, the volume of mares that we have, the way our team is able to really be super picky about the mares that those embryos go into.

That is all the things that give our customers the success that they have here at Solo Transferring Embryos. And we're really proud of the success rates that we have had. The next question, or the next thing I'm going to go into is broodmare management at Solo. What happens whenever you call and say you want your mare to come to Solo to be bred, whether that's bred to carry, whether that's bred to flesh, whether that's bred to ICSI? So when you call us, you're probably going to talk to Cody in the front office. And Cody has been with us several years. She is an absolute pro in all faucets of the braiding industry. And she is a great, great point of contact and a great resource for our mare owners to help understand what goes on, why it goes on, the processes, the updates, all of that.

We put everybody that comes to Solo in a group text message, and that's how we keep everybody updated. So you would be, the day your mare comes, you would be put into a group message with myself, Ty, Matt. Cody, you and anybody else that you want involved in that mare's update. So whether that's your trainer that has your mare's part of the year or you don't have to include the husband or wife if they don't need to know about all the breeding bills, that's fine. But whoever you want to be in the group is fine with us. We'll put them in there. And you're going to be getting text messages from us that say, hey, we checked your mare today. She's a breeder tomorrow. We're going to be breeding her to metallic attack.

And you say, great. Or, hey, I changed my mind. I want to do this other step first. I want to flush her to this and let her carry to metallic attack. Whatever it may be. That text message is there to keep you updated, to communicate any changes in the breeding plans. It is a wonderful tool that we use here where you can always go back and reference, you know, when you're like, what day was my mare bred? You can just scroll up in your text and see. It's really helpful for our customers. So we've been doing that for the last couple of years and we get great feedback from it every year. People just love the ability to have direct communication with us at any time and have all that information right there at their fingertips.

If you're transferring embryos with us, we're also gonna use that message thread to keep you updated on the embryos and you will get a, if you're transferring multiple embryos, you'll get a list and a PDF format from us that's gonna have what the current status is on all of your embryos. You know, which ones work, which ones didn't, if the ones that did work. At what day pregnancy they're at, the last time they were checked. It'll say like, this mare's 43 days in full. She was last checked three days ago. Everything looked good. And that's also proven to be an extremely valuable resource for our customers and just helps them really keep up with what's going on for that breeding season. Our goal here is really just to try to keep open communication with our mare owners so they really know what's going on.

They're obviously welcome to call in, but we want to try to stay ahead of those updates and really keep them updated on when their mares are going to be bred, on the flush results, on the recent pregnancy statuses, all of that. Our goal is really to stay ahead of you on that. And we've got some really great new technology coming in that we've been working on for the past year here at Solo that's going to make this, you know, even easier and even better and really provide an outstanding customer experience. So we're excited to bring you guys that. That'll come into play this breeding season and really be perfected throughout the breeding season that's going to make a huge difference for our mare owners and our stallion owners and people that are breeding to our stallions that mares may be in another clinic.

One question we get a lot of, and this was one of our Instagram questions that they asked was, can I change stallions mid-season? Yes, we have a lot of people that change stallions throughout the season, depending on your stallion contract or where your stallion contract's at. That's what those text message groups are for. We have lots of changes to plans that happen throughout breeding season. And sometimes we are the ones that initiate those changes we say hey you know this isn't working why don't we choose or switch to the stallion for the cycle and we'll come back to that one or you know whatever it may be that's what these text message groups are for that's why you have so much direct contact with us is we really want to work with you very personally to try to make sure that everything happens as efficiently as possible as cost efficiently as possible and we get your mare hopefully in and out of here with all of the, you know, fulfilling all the orders you have, basically whatever embryos you want or pregnancies that you want for the year.

The next thing I'm going to kind of roll into is foaling in newborn care. So before I get into the foaling out services here at Solo, one thing we need to touch on is we have had a lot of people calling wanting to send mares, say, hey, my mare's due in February 15th and I want to bring her after that to breed. We are not taking mares here at Solo that did not fall out here. People don't understand why, and I will try to explain it the best that I can. At Solo, we are very specific about the things we do when these babies are born. They get plasma that protects them against rhodococcus. They get plasma that protects them from different things that can cause diarrhea. And when you have a baby that's going to be around other babies, just think about how kids are at kindergarten.

They all run around snotty-nosed all the time. There's nothing you can do about it. You can keep the kindergarten class as clean as possible. You can vaccinate them. You can do all kinds of things. They just, they're going to share the love. And so at Solo, it doesn't matter how clean we keep it, what vaccinations we give, everything we do. If we have a bunch of babies come in that didn't get the same care, didn't grow up here, come in stressed, bring in different disease or sickness. It exposes all the babies that were born here, that have been born here and lived here from day one to all of that. So we do not let any foals come in that weren't born here. The babies that are born here, you just have to think this is home to them.

When they're here, they're not stressed out. They were born here. This is what they know. They have had all the precautionary things that we do, like the plasma, and we are consistently checking their white counts and things like that to make sure that those babies are healthy. When those foals come in that are a month old, we don't know what they've been exposed to. We don't know if whatever they've been exposed to, whenever they come in, they're stressed because it's a new place and they're not used to it and they were born in a pasture somewhere and they may carry something that they give to their neighbor foal and all of a sudden we've got a row of sick babies and so for us that just keeps some control around the foals that we have here to keep everybody safe everybody healthy we are not going to be taking any babies or any wet mares so if you have a mare that you want to bring to breed that mare will need to fall out here otherwise we can absolutely recommend some different places that are set up to take those babies that are born other places and we can ship semen to you there or they're local a lot of them they can pick semen up so we can definitely give you some other options here to try and help make sure that you've got a good spot to go with those babies and so.

When we talk about foaling and newborn care here at Solo Select, I think that kind of explains why we prefer for these mares to have these babies on site and only have babies that were born on site here. But a lot of things we get questions about is plasma. Why is plasma so expensive and why do we give it? I can just tell you that, you know, myself this year will probably have 30 to 40 foals born and that plasma is very expensive. I pay solo for the plasma just like anybody else does. and every single one of my babies is going to get plasma. And if I could double the plasma they're going to get, I would.

That plasma is huge to make sure those babies get off to the right start. It protects them against rotococcus, which if you don't know what rotococcus is, you should definitely read up on it. Anybody that's in this Texas, Oklahoma area at some point is going to be fighting rotococcus. The plasma that we give is specifically formulated for the rotococcus that we see in this area. Rhodococcus is something that almost all babies are going to carry that are born down in here. When their immune system gets compromised, you'll see the rhodococcus really kind of rear its head, which is a lot of times whenever it starts getting hot or anything that can stress those babies. And that plasma isn't going to keep them from getting the rhodococcus, but it is going to help if they do get rhodococcus for that treatment to be more effective.

It makes it where the rhodococcus is not nearly as severe it is definitely it can literally save their lives same thing with the plasma for diarrhea there's different things that can give these babies diarrhea a baby that has diarrhea can turn like that and this plasma is specifically formulated to help protect them against that does that mean that they're not going to get anything that could cause the diarrhea no does it mean that whatever treatments we do will be more effective against getting them protected against it? Yes, absolutely. There is a reason that we do that. It is very important here. We would be more than happy to let you talk to our veterinarians that can explain that to you more in depth. But every baby here is going to get plasma.

So if they come here, you will see it in our contract. They're going to get plasma. We're going to pull blood right whenever they're born and make sure that we don't have anything elevated like an elevated white count. 24 hours after they're born, we're going to make sure they don't have an elevated white count that would indicate something like a joint infection, which is the beginning of something you're never going to see if you don't pull blood, but can be something that is detrimental to those babies three or four days old. And so. Those are very, very important things that we try to do everything we can to protect these babies. I always say we've already done the hard work of getting them here and getting them here safely.

There's no reason not to take those extra steps in those first couple critical days to make sure that we have everything set up to give those babies the best success at life. We have a team here that's been foaling out since 2020. It's the same group of people that have been foaling out for us. They're absolutely exceptional at what they do. They fold out close to 300 foals last year. I think we'll do that or a little more this year. And they're very, very experienced with it. We have multiple on-site vets that specialize in reproduction and newborn care. And we're set up to make sure that we give those babies the best chance at success. As far as monitoring goes for mares that are going to fall out, a lot of people say, my mare's just going to fall out outside.

And that's fine. I totally understand that. And it's always say it's fine until it's not, until you wake up one morning and there's a fall out there that's still in the sack that if somebody would have just been there to open that sack up, your baby would be alive. But it's not right now. And there's just so many different things that can happen with those mares falling out. In my opinion, it's the best money you'll spend to have somebody monitoring them. Our team is, this is 24-7 during breeding season. We have a group at night that all they do is full out. So they come in, they have their lawn chairs. Anytime you walk through our foaling barn, you'll see a couple lawn chairs out there. Those are for our guys at night and they sit and watch those mares.

We don't use foal alerts here. We feel like it's better for us to have eyes on those horses than the foal alerts. That's just the way we do it. There's 10 different ways to skin that cat. We decide that for our crew, it's better just for them to have eyes on them. So they bring those mares in whenever they look like they're getting close and we have them lined up there and they are there to assist if the mare needs help. But we generally try to stay out of the mare's way. If everything looks like it's going well, we'll just stay there, keep an eye on it, try to keep it as low stress as possible for the mare and the baby. And then we're right there whenever the baby is on the ground to make sure nostrils are clear, everything looks good, There's no emergent care needed, anything like that.

Folling is an art in itself. We have an incredible team that helps take care of these babies when they're born that keeps a very close eye on them for those first 30 days, which is so, so critical because any change, even the slightest change, can end up in a foal that's very sick very quickly. And kind of wrapping up here, I'm going to talk a little bit about raising these babies and kind of what that looks like after day 30 here at Solo. A lot of people that are falling out here will leave them until about, you know, two weeks to 30 days if they're on a resit mare. Whenever they're, depending on how far they're going, they'll kind of figure out when they need to ship them. They're going a really long ways.

You know, if they need to be shipped cross-country, a lot of times they'll leave a lot longer than just two weeks, of course. but if they're just going home 20 minutes down the road at two to three weeks or so, they'll come get them and take them home. If we have a mare that actually carried her own foal that's being bred back, we can handle that. We'll keep the baby here and make sure that baby is good and healthy and straight-legged and all that.

Now, that's kind of what I want to roll into now is legs and all the care that happens after week one. Babies are going to be born with legs that face the wrong direction sometimes. That's just part of it. It doesn't mean that your broodmare has babies that are crooked-legged. It doesn't mean the stud has babies that are crooked-legged. Sometimes it just happens. And it happens probably a lot more than people see because we don't see that many crooked-legged horses. But most of the time, not always, but a lot of times whenever those horses are crooked-legged, as an older horse, as a four or five, six-year-old, it's because early intervention was not put into place. Sometimes early intervention is as simple as, hey, my baby turns out a little bit, and they just need to stay up in a stall for a couple of weeks where if your baby was just born outside and you never got very close to it and you never saw it, its leg was turned out, it's probably going to be turned out forever at that point. And so...

Watching legs is very important. Babies can be born straight and as they grow, they get to grow in a little fast and those legs get to go in a little funky and just backing off the feet or pulling them in or just limiting their exercise or there's different medications we can give them or supplements we can give them that will help their legs straighten up. And so that is very much an art in itself. Highly recommend making sure you have a vet that is experienced with babies and raising babies. And that sometimes is the mix between your performance horse vet and your breeding vet that kind of come together to help come up with a treatment plan, especially on those cases that are a little bit more complex.

But generally one or the other can give you a very good game plan of things that you can do that don't require a surgery that don't require corrective chewing or trimming or anything like that they're as simple as put your baby in a stall for two weeks where they limit their movement they straighten up you kick them back out but if you don't do that you have a crooked legged baby and as we know that's going to be a huge detriment to that horse's performance horse career or to their resale value so that's something that i highly suggest you stay on top of here at solo a lot of people will end up leaving these babies here for us to raise so those mares will fill out and then they'll say hey i'm gonna leave my baby with you guys that's great we have a comprehensive program to make sure that those babies get everything they need nutritionally care wise as far as veterinary care or vaccinations having eyes on them multiple times a day all the babies here are kept in traps that are they're rotated throughout the year they're.

Our guys clean the traps that the babies are in multiple times a week. They all have grass in them. This isn't a situation where they're on a dry lot. They're always in grass and they're always in pipe fence. I'd encourage you if you're wanting to look and see where your baby would live, if you are looking for somebody to raise your one or your set of horses, to come here and go through our babies in yearlands and see where they live, what they look like, what the caliber of care is, to help you make your decision on what you want to do. But we are happy to take care of those babies. we raise a hundred or so foals a year. It may be more than that last year. It may have been closer to 150 yearlings that we have coming up that are raised under our care.

And then this June, as yearlings, they'll come up and we'll start evaluating them for the owners and say, hey, these are the sales we recommend, or this is what we need to do to prepare them to go be started, or just depending on the owner's goals, we can help you kind of decide what those next steps are. So in closing, hopefully that gives you guys an idea a little bit about what does breeding season look like? What does solo select do in the process? How to make it as cost efficient as possible? How to make it as successful as possible? Everybody in this breeding business, during breeding season, we all get hectic. We all get busy. But I think in overall, every single stallion station, us, everybody included, we all want you to get the foals on the ground that you want.

We're all rallying for your success. So reach out to, you know, feel free to reach out to us here at Solo to help you with your stallion contracts, your breeding services, re-sip services, whatever it is. We are pretty well able to handle every single part of the breeding process from A to Z, all the way, as you can tell, from stallions and ICSI and flushing and carrying to getting your babies raised to sale fitting them to making sure that they go to the right sale to bring the most return for you. So we'd love to talk to you guys. If we can help advise you on any of that, you can call our office. There's a number for our main office, which is Cody, who is the best person to advise you on mare care and the different types of breeding services we offer.

And then you'll see our stallion office. And Madison and Lori in that office will be the best people to help you with any questions you have about stallion contracts, shipping, any questions we didn't answer here about ordering semen or anything like that. Or like I said, if you need some advice on, you're looking for a vet or a stallion station that's close to you to take your mare to get her bred, we're happy to help advise on that too. So we look forward to a great breeding season this year and of course, happy to help if you guys have any questions.