Episode 13 - Breeding 101 - Episode 2 - Breeding with intention

Hi everyone, this is Melanie at Sola Select. This is going to be our second podcast in our series that we're doing about breeding mares. Just getting ready for breeding season, trying to share some information with you guys on how to make really educated decisions, whether it's, what methods you're going to use to breed your mare for the year. The last podcast, if you haven't listened to it yet, we talked a lot about stallion contracts and ICSI and flushing mares and just trying to kind of explain Breeding 101. We had a lot of great feedback on that podcast. And so the second one that we're doing is going to be about really decision making. When you have a mare, we know all year, just like we do, you think about, well, what do I want a breeder to?

You You watch the stallions, you watch their offspring, you see the advertisements, and of course all of that plays in throughout the year to help you make a decision on how you're going to breed your mare. The first thing we're going to talk about today is breeding to sell versus breeding to keep. This is something that I get asked about a lot. Whenever somebody comes to me and asks me, you know, what should I breed my mare to, that's always my first question. What's our goal? What are we doing here? Are we selling them or are we keeping them? Are we training them or are we trying to sell them as an embryo or a yearling. They're very different choices a lot of times. A lot of people that are breeding them to keep, I'm going to tell them, what do you personally love? What studs do you personally love?

And let me help you kind of based on those horses' confirmation and your mare's confirmation, those stallions' strengths and weaknesses, and your mare's strengths and weaknesses. Let's talk through that and give you a couple options that I think are your dream cross. And are we keeping them to go put them in training and promote your mare. That's another thing that we may not breed to the most popular sire that year, but we think this is going to be the perfect cross that's going to have a baby that's going to train for whatever discipline you want to do. So when we're talking about breeding to sell versus breeding to keep, if we're truly breeding to keep them, we're going to be the decision is weighed more on what is the perfect cross for that mare and less on the marketability.

When we're breeding to sell, sometimes we have to give a little bit and we think this would be a really good cross, but unfortunately the offspring by that stallion may not be super marketable for whatever reason it is. They may not be the trending sire. They may not be in the right incentives, but now there's so many horses or so many different stallions to choose from, usually you don't have to sacrifice that. Whatever boxes are important to you, you can check and still have something that is a marketable fall. And when I talk about breeding to sell, I really say these people rely on me a lot to know and watch these sales year-round. And Ty, who sees and watches and buys and sells as many horses as anybody in the world, to be able to tell them this is what sells. This is based off of the historical data from the last two years.

These are the crosses that have sold the best. And unfortunately, that may not be the perfect cross for that mare if we were going to keep them and say, we want to train a faturity champ. But sometimes that's not the most marketable cross, whether people like to hear that or not. And so that's where it's nice to have a mare that we can embryo transfer or ICSI where we can say, you know, in theory, this might not be our, if we pick the perfect cross for this mare, this might be our third choice. But we think this is the most marketable one. Doesn't mean it's a bad cross. and it doesn't mean it might not be the best one that we have all year, but it gives us a couple different options where maybe we can breed to choice one, two, and three, and two and three are very sellable, and one is maybe not the most marketable of the three crosses, but what we, theoretically think is going to be the best cross, and that's the one you keep.

So lots of different ways we can go about that. When we talk about the stud fees factoring into the return on investment, this is really important. I will get a lot of people that call me and say, hey, I have this mare and I love her and we roped on her or we cut on her, but just at a club level, but she was a great horse and this and that. And I want to breed her to a stud that's got a 7,500 to. $12,000 stud fee. And that is a talk that you hate to have with people, but that's why they call me because they want a realistic answer. And sometimes if we're not keeping that one, if we're not raising it to keep and we're totally fine with it losing money if we have to sell it, that's too much stallion for your mayor.

And it's not that the mayor doesn't warrant that or we don't think the mayor is good enough, but the fact is when you're flipping through a sale catalog, whether you're online or in an in-person sale, that black type is going to have a very big effect on what that mare brings. And I'm sorry, what that yearling brings or two-year-old or whatever age it is, whether it's an embryo, whatever it may be. And we can't quantify in the black type how good of a horse your mare was unless it's written in black type on there. So the fact that you told me she was the best two-year-old that we had that year. She was probably worth a half a million dollars if we would have taken her to the two-year-old cell, but she got hurt. I can't write that on the black type.

So, you know, you've got to decide at that point, are we breeding to try and maximize our mare? We do think she's a great horse. We really believe in her. We know these first couple foals may break even, but we're going to make sure they get in the right programs. And we want to maybe overbreed her, breed her to a stallion whose stud fee may be a little high to get a good return on your investment, but we're going to invest in this mare and make sure that we breed her to exactly what we think is the perfect horse, regardless of what the stud bee is. And if those foals break even or get close to it, we know that's kind of a sacrifice we're going to make for a couple of years until she gets to prove herself.

There's nothing wrong with that answer. You just have to be prepared that you may break even or lose money for a couple of years. And then if those first couple of foals hit, you look like a genius. If the first couple of foals don't hit, you don't look like a genius. And that's part of the gamble that we all take breeding horses. And the stud fee is a huge factor in the ROI. There's times where we would suggest to breed up and say, this is probably a little too much stallion for your mare, but if you're ready to take the ride and you really believe in her and we believe in her, that's what we would suggest doing. And there's sometimes that we say, hey, we can breed to a really good horse for less money. And you can breed to great horses. I mean.

For some of them less than $2,000. And they're still really good horses that have very, very marketable foals. And, you know, we see that a lot with like Tic Tac. He's a perfect example of a stud that his stud fee isn't outrageous. His stud fee is $2,000, but his yearlings are averaging $25,000 to $30,000 in our sale. Well, that's a horse that we don't have to throw so much money at a stud fee on, but we still have something that's as marketable as some of these studs that have $7,500 to $10,000 stud fees. So it's totally dependent on the mare. The stud fee is very important, but it's dependent on the mare and it's really dependent on you as a breeder and what your goals are for your program, your mare, and your cash flow.

And whether anybody wants to admit it or not, we have to have a cash flow in this breeding game to be able to continue year after year to buy stud fees or pay for recepts or whatever it may be. So yes, there are some times that we may breed a mare specifically to sell that bull with an ROI on the stud fee in mind, and that way we can continue to cash flow that breeding program. And the fun part of this breeding game is you never know, the one that we think is just the most marketable and maybe not our number one cross, like I said earlier, it's our number three cross, that could be the best cross of all of them. So it's fun because we get to make all these, we get to give you all these ideas and theories, and this is what we think is going to work, and no, that's probably not going to work and you're going to make your decisions whether you go with what we say or not.

And then it's always fun to see them when they're three and four-year-olds to see what really did work because they prove us wrong. It happens and it's fun to see them grow up whether you still own them or sell them. Some of the other questions that we get, can, this is a good one, can affordable mares still produce valuable offspring? This is a tricky situation because Ty and I have always bought what we could afford. And sometimes we could afford mares that were $7,500, $5,000 mares, but structurally and their mind and their pedigree, we really liked them. They did not have the black type to back it up, but we really liked the individual herself. And we were willing to put in what I would call the sweat equity, whether you want to say owning her for three years to see what that first yearling looks like or all the money that you dump into them for three years until that first yearling is where you can kind of see the quality that you're going to get.

We've done that and I think we have a set of mares out here that a lot of them weren't expensive mares. They cost less than $10,000 when we first bought them, but we bought them with intention. We didn't just go out and say, oh, she's Roan. She has big mane and tail and she's by the most popular sire going and we're going to buy her to breed. That doesn't work. There are very specific things that we look for on those mares that we buy that are not proven that make them affordable, but still make them mares that we can make work. Those yearlings will at least pay for themselves for the first couple of years until we can see what they are. We've got a mare out here that is a daughter of big time favorite that we bought.

Didn't cost a lot. We've had her for three or four years. Probably cost $7,500. She won a little bit on the track, but she looks right. She's got a good wither. She runs uphill. She's not downhill. She's not hip high. She's good bone, good footed, big, pretty mare, and just has a decent black type. Out of a good mother, but just a decent black type herself. That mare was affordable for us. We brought her to Tic Tac because we have a stallion that we wanted to promote, and we did everything we could. We raised those foals the right way. you know they were on the best nutrition we gave them every opportunity to grow up and look really good and you know be sound and all the things that we do that we've talked about in other podcasts that give these babies the best opportunity we can to be winners and it's pretty cool because it's the first one that we have is now a two-year-old in training and I think it's probably our best two-year-old that's in training as far as for the rope horse deal.

And it's out of a mare that didn't cost anything. We have some out there that are really nice horses, but this is the best one so far. And they're out of mares that cost $100,000 to $150,000. And so we have gotten to experience all different tiers here at Solo Select. And Ty and I have owned anything from these mares that didn't hardly cost anything to the mares that cost a lot. And we do own a wide variety of those mares. And I think it's important for everyone to know that any of those mares can work. Like you can play this game at any level. You don't have to have a hundred thousand to go buy a mare to have success in the breeding game, but you do have to buy them with intention and you have to buy the right mares.

And so that's what I kind of encourage people when they call and say, how much do I have to spend to get a mare that's going to work? Well. How fast do you want it to work? Are you willing to put in some sweat equity? Are you willing to try to prove this mare for a little bit? If you're willing to do some of that, we don't have to spend as much money a lot of times. We can kind of go in and be very intentional and buy a mare that maybe doesn't cost as much. Now, if you want to be on the fast track and you want to immediately have a chance to have six-digit yearlings, well, that's probably not going to happen with the $7,500 mare. So, you know, some of that is your goals and how fast and what your expectations are to topping a sale or whatever it is that your goal is.

We can't do that with the $7,500 mare. So the reality is, if you want it to happen quickly, you've got to pay for it. We've got mares that cost in the six digits that we own or customers own or whatever it may be. And those mares still cash flow. it's all relative and it's all different levels of playing but you can still have success at all the levels and that's my favorite thing about what we've built at solo select and just the horse industry in general right now is you can play at so many levels we can play with a 5 000 or 7 500 mare and we can play with a 500 000 mare and here at solo we can advise you on all levels of those and we can help you with the path to, hey, I have my $5,000 mare and this is the yearling I got from it.

And we say, hey, this is working. This mare is good. Let's figure out where we need to sell this baby. Or hey, maybe this isn't working. Either we need to breed to a different stud or maybe we need to reevaluate our mare choice. And so that would be my biggest takeaway I would love people to understand walking away from this is breeding is not always a rich man's game. We can play at all the levels in every discipline really. And that's one of the coolest things about it. So one thing that I think is a really powerful tool we have here at Solo Select for our customers or for people that are just getting their toes wet in the breeding game is a program we have called Select Genes. That program has been wildly popular over the last couple of years.

I started it back, I guess it's probably been in 2023. This is, I think, our third breeding season with it. And the deal was, is we had a lot of mares here that were exceptional mares of all levels, mares anywhere from maturity champions to mares that were maybe didn't win anything but were out of great mothers and just beginning their production career and I thought those mares are only getting used a couple months out of the year and a lot of times they're just hanging out here after that so what if we can provide a win-win for both our customers that have those mares here and people that want to buy embryos out of those mares and give a structured way, for them to come in and buy aspirations out of that mare to have a chance to get multiple embryos over several years and really be able to play the game at a level they wouldn't otherwise be able to play unless they shelled out 50 to 500,000 to a million dollars for a mare.

So we put it out there. I wasn't sure if it was going to pit or not. It has been fantastic. And it has been such a great opportunity for both parties. So our customers that have their mares here that stay year-round, have the opportunity to enroll their mares in select genes. And so those mares will get pictured and will put their black types and all of their information on the select genes website. We'll put a price on there for what we think those embryos are worth. Then our buyers, which is, can be, it's a huge variety of people. Sometimes it's people that have a lot of mares. Sometimes it's somebody that has not one mare. They don't own one brood mare, but they want to play in the breeding game.

They're not really dying to go give all that money for a mare and keeper. It's perfect for them too. They can go and look at those mares. We have embryos on there from $5,000, which is a, I think it's one of my mares, a black Abra cat mare that's produced maybe a hundred thousand or so that's out of a really good maternal side. We've got her all the way up to like Todd Carpenter has Sweet on Stevie on there, which is a Stevie mare that's out of Sweet Abra. That's currently showing him winning in the open, in the cutting. We've got a little of everything. And so it's really cool that all of those different calibers of mares are available. You can choose exactly the way you want to breed them. So you can get on there. You can look at those mares.

You can choose your stallion. We call it a custom aspiration. Cool part two is sometimes we can choose a stallion like Woody that has sex semen. So sometimes not only do you get to choose a stallion that you want to breed her to, but you also get to choose a horse like Woody that has sex semen, we can know we're going to get a filly. And so you almost get to completely customize your full. We even have some people that come in and will test those embryos to see what sex and color and all that they're going to get. And it just allows them to play at a price that makes it all work. So for example, I have a cat mare on there that I own that was reserve champion at the faturity the year that metallic cat won it so she was second behind metallic cat she's a highbrow cat daughter she has produced over 300,000 now.

And I think we have her on there for $15,000. So that's an opportunity. And that mare always gives us quite a few embryos. So that's a great opportunity for people that, you know, wouldn't otherwise be able to go or don't want to go and buy a mare of that caliber that won all that money in the open. They can buy that mare. And we had a customer, for instance, that bought embryos out of her and ended up going to, I think it was Shining Spark or something along those lines, and got a colt on the ground, or it was a filly, actually, that was. beautiful. Roan flanked, four white socks, absolutely gorgeous. And that filly brought, I think, $65,000 on the sale as a baby. And so that was super fun for him. He never had to own a mare.

He bought the embryos. We put them in the recipes. We raised the baby for him. So he was hands-off except for all the pretty pictures he got to see of his baby when it was born and come and see it when it was born and get to enjoy that ride. And then, you know, about the time it was time to wean it, I said, hey, I think this baby will sell really good. She's beautiful. She looks great. Let's try to sell her. And he said, yeah, it's, you know, you're running the show. Go for it. He let me kind of choose how to sell her and when to sell her. And we did. And it was super successful for him. And on top of that, he still has multiple other embryos on that mare. And.

That one may have been his first one, he had $15,000 in, but then he has several other embryos that are frozen or in mares now or whatever it is, and those are only going to cost $7,500 because we cut that first price in half on the additional. So that's just one example of how Select Genes has been super beneficial for people. We had some people this year that bought some out of a mare, and we ended up selling those embryos as embryos for four times what they gave for them from Select Genes. And they were in the right place at the right time and they were able to sell them as embryos. And so there's a lot of great opportunity with that. And that kind of goes into, sometimes you might not be able to afford a six digit mare, but you can definitely afford a $15,000 embryo.

Well, that's your way to play at the level you want to play at. And so it provides a great opportunity for anybody that wants to play the game at a certain level, but not give that much for a mare. And it also provides a really good way for our mare owners to kind of cash flow their mares throughout the year whenever they sell embryos. And, you know, it doesn't just, they're not gonna make a living off of it, but they can definitely make it where that mare might have no bills for the year. And, you know, she lived here for free by the time they got their Select Jeans money and they paid for one of their embryos or two of their embryos, just depending on how popular the mare's been. So it's been a great program for both parties. But if anybody has any questions about that, is interested in that, you can get on our website at select-jeans.com or you can call our office.

Cody in our office is kind of our select genes pro. She knows all the mares inside and out. You can call Ty or myself or Dawn too or Matt. All of us know about those mares and we're happy to discuss them with you guys. But I think that's a great, great opportunity for anybody that wants to dip their toes into the breeding game and not dive all the way in right off the bat. One thing, one question we have on here is why does structure matter more than papers alone. This is really something that Ty is so big on. And I think... Doug Carpenter was one of his mentors, and I think Doug really taught him a lot about this. Ty put a lot of time into driving around and looking at babies with Doug and mares and yearlings and two-year-olds and horses and training, all that.

But they looked at a lot of babies, and I think what Ty really picked up for that and what he's so good at is being able to look at these mares or yearlings or babies, whatever it is, and say structurally, this one is perfect. This is exactly what I want to see. Does that mean they're going to be a maturity champion? Not always. But we are going to try and help our customers choose mares that structurally are made to do whatever job we are signing them and their foals up for. So whether that's a cutting horse mare that walks really wide, is good necked, she's made to stay sound. That's a big part of it. Some of these mares, they're freaky talented, but they're just not made to be sound. Right.

Doesn't mean we can't buy her for a broodmare, but we better make sure we very intentionally breed her to a stallion that confirmationally will hopefully clean some of that up. But when Ty and I look for mares, we really want to find ones that the very first box we check is structure based on whatever we want to do. A mare that we're buying to get babies to go to the cutting is really different now than a mare we're trying to buy to get babies that can go to the cow horse. Sometimes those two can interlock, but a lot of times they don't just because those disciplines have gotten so specialized. The same thing for the rope horse deal. It's getting so specialized. So we're buying really specific mares to produce head horses, and we're buying really specific mares to produce heel horses.

And so we do have these special mares around here that are the caliber of mares that when crossed appropriately with the right stallions, they have the structure and genetics that we can cross them in multiple disciplines. Like we have a lot of racehorse mares that we have customers breed to racehorses for the first two or three flushes of the year. And then we flush them to, or Ixium, to a rope horse or a cutting horse stallion to produce a rope horse. And that's a really good business plan for somebody. And those mares are bought specifically when we advise our customers on them, bought very specifically to be able to go both ways. And so that is that is where structure comes in you know structure is number one then we go to like how are they bred of course these ones that are out of phenomenal maternal lines are always going to get a little bit of preference but like when Doug and Ty would walk out to a pasture Doug didn't want to know how they were bred right off the bat he wanted to look at the individual and judge them by not only their confirmation but also which I think is equally as important is their presence like you can tell whether it's a mare or a foal just being around them and.

I'm probably a little biased to one that has a really big pretty eye and is really bright eared and always looking at what you're doing and really smart and. And you can see all those things in the pasture with a baby, the way they look as you walk around them and walk through them. And it's still similar with the mare. Those are really important traits. So then we move on to our papers, genetic testing, soundness, all of those things still come into account. But I would say our first two most important things are confirmationally and structurally. What is this mare made like? And then we move on to those next checkboxes on our list. Commercial versus personal priorities. Define your end goal first, and then let's go from there. That is so important.

I have to know, you have to know, what direction are we going? You know, we talked about this a couple times in here, but I think it's, I think this is probably what gets most people the most discouraged in the breeding game, is they don't really know what direction they were going. They didn't have a goal or a plan. They just bred to breed their mare because as they just did. And then all of a sudden, you know, whenever they come to you and try to sell them as yearlings, they're like, hey, well, I don't understand why my yearling won't bring anything. It's not, we, you didn't ask us how to breed it. You didn't ask for our advice. And now you've got a yearling that you want X amount of dollars for because you have a lot of money tied up in it.

And it's just, the market just isn't going to tolerate it. It's just not, it's not a 20 or 50 or $100,000 a yearling, whatever the number is. I think that's when people are like, well, it's what, when I looked at the stats, it said that I needed to cross it this way. That's what the number one cross was. I can't believe people won't buy it or they don't want it. And it's like, well, that's a very, very, very small factor into, you know, the breeding game. There's a lot more factors. You could cross whatever the number one cross is for the barrel horse, race horse, the cutting horses, cow horses, whatever it is this year, we can do that magic cross this year and we can still have a $10,000 yearling at the end of it.

That's probably the thing I hear that gets people the most discouraged. And that's where reaching out to people, whether it's us or there's plenty of other people in the industry that are in the trenches every day, know the markets, understand they're involved in the sales and the breeding aspect. So we have a unique perspective to know what the breeding costs are, what we're going to end up having in this baby, and then also knowing what is the reality of today, which is obviously three years. We're going to make that breeding decision three years before that one's going to sell as a yearling, basically. But as of today, our most educated choice is this because we spent, you know, 40 days of last year at a horse sale. We know what these are probably going to bring.

So use your resources and define your end goals. Figure out what your real goal for this is. If you want to have one that you just love and it's the perfect Palomino colt that you've always dreamed of, that's great. Just if you breed it that way and we say, hey, this might not be the most marketable. You can't be mad when they're yearlings and they don't bring what you have in them. And so that's some of the defining your end goals. Market trends versus rideability. This is such a good subject. And we can go on both sides of this. Avoiding the popular stallion syndrome. So important. Such a great we could have a whole podcast dedicated to this and with a roundtable of people that discuss this and it's a hot topic right now because especially because of the incentives and I hear the feedback from some other stallion owners and and mare owners and everybody is like well you know I'm breeding with intention like everybody says to do but my colts aren't marketable because I didn't breed to one that was in this incentive or that incentive or was popular this year or whatever it may be.

There is a very fine line that we all have to walk and this is all going to go back to what are your goals. This is define your end goal. If your end goal is that we need to, we want to play the breeding game, but the reality is the breeding game has to pay for itself, you may sometimes have to have a little of that popular Sire syndrome to get your money back. That's all there is to it. That's the reality of it. You've got to breed to something that people want to buy because either they're eligible for millions and incentives or you know one by that or won the maturity last year or whatever it is whatever it may be. Then there is the other part of this line that we've got to walk that, like we've talked about a couple of times here, structurally, conformationally, mind, what, you know, pedigree based off of what's previously worked, all the things we've talked about, what is the right cross on this mare?

I think that the thing these days is we have so many great stallions to choose from. I don't feel like there is very many times that I really can truly not get the best of both worlds. There's so many great stallions that are marketable that the stallion owners are investing in them and they are paying them into these incentives or they're putting their own money up for incentives and they have really invested in these horses there's a lot of stallions that do have all of those boxes checked that are also great crosses on those mares you know i think three or four years ago we saw just a very small pool of stallions that were heavily incentivized and now over the last three or four years, that pool's really gotten really wide.

And so I think three or four years ago, it was hard to really say, gosh, I don't think that's the best cross, but I know I got to breed my mare that way. If, you know, here solo for me and Ty, it's got to work. It's got to, it does have to pencil. And so we have to make a decision that pencils, those, this isn't a, for fun and games, like those yearlings have to be profitable for us to be able to breed them the next year and breed those, you know, continue the cycle. So that was a hard decision a couple years ago. I think now so many stallions are in these incentives. They're eligible for so much that can fit everybody's different programs and. I don't feel, for me, that's a decision that I have a hard time making anymore just because our pool has gotten so much wider.

But that is something that you've got to keep in mind, avoiding just breeding to just a popular stallion. But it's just something you've got to balance. And we just try to do our best to keep it in balance. We try to make the best decisions we can to not just breed to the most popular sellable stallion, but breeding to something that's the right cross for our mare. But as I said, I really think that this time, you know, three or four years into this big incentive game that had started, I'd say back in 2020 or so, 2021, there's enough to choose from. We can almost always find something that's at the right cross on the mare. Breeding towards a program identity. This is a good subject. And this is a lot of the conversations. We do a lot of consulting.

So Ty and I individually offer different consulting opportunities for people where they can book online with us and consult for an hourly rate. And we'll talk through, a lot of times it's breeding programs. That's most of the time who it is. Somebody that's starting a new breeding program or has a breeding program. And I think this is what generally we end up talking about is they want to have a legacy, an identity, whatever you want to call it. They have this breeding program. Maybe they have some mares or they're getting ready to buy some mares. And this all funnels back to what is your goal? Have you defined your end goal? I have to ask those people. That's the first question I ask them. What are we doing here? Are we trying to make this cash flow?

Are we trying to have the next maturity champion? Are we trying to raise really nice big strong ranch horses are we trying to sell the highest selling embryos every year to cutters or to barrel horse people or to racehorse people whatever it is there's a million different answers to that question but I have to know to be able to advise you and so when you think of how am I going to build an identity build a brand build a legacy, around a ranch or a breeder's name. It's really, what are your goals? What's your budget? And then let's figure out the best way to get there. That. Feeds back to every single thing we've talked about so far. Breeding, not always having to choose the popular stallions, sometimes choosing the right stallions, and really building a program that doesn't have to be profitable for the first five years, but that's really horses that we love if we don't have to sell them.

We want to create horses that are perfect in our eyes. And I think that all of that goes back to with program identity. You need to identify your goals, your budget, your cash flow. When do you need a return on the cash flow? Maybe you never do. maybe you need one in year one. That is going to dictate a lot of how we advise on how to build your program. And a lot of that's going to depend on your taste for risk and how fast you want this to happen. If you want to build a program identity in two years, we can do that. It's just going to cost. It's something we can do, but it just takes money. If you don't have endless amounts of fun, we can still do it. It's no problem. It's just going to take a little bit of time.

And that's part of the fun of it is the ride to get to the legacy that you want to build. And neither of those answers are right or wrong. We just have to know what the cards are and we can tell you how to blam. Timeline, which is what we just talked about. This is the part where the money comes into play. We can make almost anything happen very quickly if you want to have a big enough budget. If you can be patient, we can make really great things happen with a little bit of time and a lot less money. So it's just dependent on how much time you have, how much funds you have to throw at this, and are you going to be patient enough for the long game or do we need to make this thing cash flow right up front?

Once again, neither is a wrong answer. That's just the reality of going back to define your end goal and tell us and we can help advise you, whatever it is. And the last thing I kind of want to talk about with breeding to sell versus breeding to keep is the color and the looks and panel tests and all of that. I see a lot of people that will, and this is just personal preference. This is, I totally understand either way, but I see a lot of people that say like, well, I am looking for a mare or they'll call me. I'm looking for a mare. I only want to buy one that's clean on all the panels. Totally get it. It's personal preference, but there is a lot of horses that you may skip over trying to get one that's not a herda carrier.

So I would, we have those panels for information for us. We, it helps us decide what stallions to breed to, but it's purely informational unless you have something that we don't see this here in our industry, but unless you have one that's HYPP positive, that's a whole different thing. But when we're talking about recessive genes like HERTA and GVED and things like that, we're going to see it. It's going to be out there. We're not going to breed it out of them. It is what it is. And there's going to be, over the next 20 years, there's going to be 10 or 20 or 100 more of those discovered. And it's just with a recessive gene, I think it's very much, it's just an informational tool for us to help us choose the right stallion where we aren't exacerbating those diseases to have ones that are herda-positive, that are herda-herda, but that's all it is.

Take it as your information, what you've got. There you go. Color, looks, all of that. We all love to get a black or blue roan. It's like you get your gift and it's wrapped in a beautiful bow if it's black and blue roan. And that's fun and it's different. But when they're four years old, when they're babies, it's cool when they're different colors and all that. When they're four years old and they're out there either absolutely kicking everybody's rear end or they're blue roan and they are not very good horses, you don't care what color they are then. And that's what I've learned because I'm no different than anybody else. I love to get one that's a fun color that looks cool or whatever, but looks cool doesn't win.

Doesn't win the cutting, the cow or show, the maturity. It doesn't win. color is cool and it's a fun little extra bonus that I always take into consideration but, and sometimes I'll pay a little more for if I have a mare that's brown or I have a mare that's black well I'm probably going to give just a little more for that black because whenever I get ready to sell them I know that those black-faced foals are probably going to bring just a little more it's like a little premium on top for the pretty color where I do think that color can help change whatever you want to say it is that middle market. When we're not raising the highest end horses, the horses that we think have very strong chances to be open faturity finalists, faturity champions.

Grade one race winners, whatever it is, 1D barrel horses, the very top elite level. When we're kind of breeding for that middle market, that is where the color will come to play a little bit more if our goal is to cash flow. With those horses, sometimes I say it's like an insurance plan in the reigning, let's say. You get one that is plain sorrel or you get one that's got a white face and three white socks and a big mane and tail. If that one isn't good enough and we sell it or you sell it or whoever sells it as a three-year-old and it's not an open horse, maybe it's a non-pro horse or maybe it needs to go to a different discipline, whatever. The one that's got the white on its face and three white socks is going to bring more. It's like a little insurance plan.

It just gives you a little extra gravy on top whenever it comes time to sell them, especially in the middle market, because that group of people loves a pretty horse. That group that's buying the best horses, they just want the best horse. They don't care what their genetic panel is. They don't care if their carriers have heard of, whatever. They don't care. They want one that's a winner. Those middle market people, they love six panel clean, a white face three white socks a mane that hangs past their shoulder that's all gonna make them bring more so that is the time where I think color or pretty or all of that does play in and I'm not ignorant to say that it doesn't ever play in because it does but when we're choosing how to breed them am I gonna go to the blue roan stud versus a sorrel stud it depends on my mare and my market.

But generally, if I'm for what we're trying to breed here at Solo, for just us, I can speak for what Ty and I's goals are here. We're breeding to try and have horses that are winners. And so we don't pay as close attention to that. But sometimes when I do have these people that buy these middle market mares and we say, hey, we've. Bought a black mare and we can breed her to this blue run so we can probably get black or blue and we do think it's a good cross. Yeah, sometimes that does come into consideration. So the last thing we're going to talk about today is just some red flags when you're looking at mares. Things that you need to take into consideration when you're deciding which mares to buy.

The first thing is production record that hasn't had any money earners. This goes back to your goal. Are we trying to have horses that are six-digit yearlings? Are we trying to produce really nice, maybe more of a middle market type horse and cash flow our mare? Neither answer is wrong. But if you're trying to produce those six-digit horses that are yearlings and that mare's first three foals are show age and they haven't done anything, probably not going to happen. And you have to take that into consideration. Now, with that being said, some of that is kind of the back research you do on the mare. I have mares out here that have had eight babies all by the same stud that were owned by somebody else. And I personally didn't think that was the best cross on that mare. I don't.

That whether I think they didn't get in the right program or I just didn't think that stallion was the perfect cross for that mare. And I've bought those mares and typically you get to buy those mares for a discount and I'll breed them a different way and say, feel confident that I know how this mare needs to be crossed. And she's been mismanaged, maybe isn't the right word, but that's how I would consider it. She's been managed differently than I would have managed her. She's been bred to stallions that are different than I would have done. And because I get to buy her at a discount, I don't mind gambling on her for a couple years and seeing if my theory's right or if she's just not a producer of a high-end performer.

And that doesn't make her a bad mare. She just may not produce the top elite horses. But the production record shouldn't be something that makes you say, oh, I'm not going to buy her. It just needs to factor into what you're going to give for. There's a lot of really nice mares you can buy that maybe have been bred to the wrong studs or those babies have ended up in programs that really didn't give them the perfect shot or the right opportunity to be winners. And if you know that backstory and think, hey, I think I can improve on this mare, which is a lot of times the mares that we can afford, we're happy to buy those and put a couple years into them and see if we're right or not. So I don't think buying a mare without a production record is a bad choice.

It just has a price. that mare needs to be bought at a certain price and. We've had a lot of success doing that, buying those mares that the babies have hit, the first baby or two have hit that we raised. And all of a sudden we have a mare that was bought for probably a discounted rate that now is either the mare's worth more or the babies are worth more or whatever, because we've crossed her with intention and the way that we thought she should have been crossed in the first place. Shallow pedigree depth is something that I think is important too, depending on the caliber of horses that you're trying to raise. So Doug would always say, I can forgive that the first dam wasn't a winner. Whatever reason it may be. She got hurt. She didn't get in the right program.

She just didn't get the opportunity. Owner ran out of funds, whatever it may be. Obviously, there's a lot of mares that could have, should have, would have been great horses and didn't get the opportunity for whatever reason. They don't know whenever they produce babies that they went on to win $500,000 or they won $5. Their genetics are still the same. So a lot of those mares that didn't win anything do end up becoming phenomenal producers. But he always said, I have a really hard time looking past a first and a second dam that didn't win anything, unless the second dam was a really strong producer, because that's like two strikes. But he said, but I can if the mayor's right, if confirmationally, structurally, there's a lot of things I really like about her. I can look past that.

When you get down to the third dam hasn't done anything, that's when it's going to be really hard to ever convince somebody to try them in that elite performance level. Does that mean that we don't have really nice horses that come from maternal sides that have not produced what I call a black type winter? Absolutely not. There are a lot of mares that we own or we breed for people or we advise people on that have maternal lines that haven't done a significant amount, but it doesn't mean we can't breed those mares to the best stallion that we can and have marketable or really nice foals. It's just a different level. You just have to choose your goal. Are we trying to take them to the cutting maturity sale or to one of our yearling sales?

Or do we want something to take to a regional sale? Those are three different things with three different mayors. If we take them to a regional sale, those people don't care if the mayor, if the dam want anything. They want a really big, strong, pretty colt. That's what they want. If the second dam produced 400,000, that's cool, but that's not that big of a deal to them So a lot of that is our audience that we're going to sell to and as i've said 10 jillion times on this podcast goes back to our goals What are we doing? What's our plan? Where are we going to sell these at or are we going to sell them? That's what it all goes back to but if we're trying to produce those top highest top end elite performance horses we do have to pay attention to the pedigree depth and especially on the maternal side that's where i think it's the most important the sire of those broodmares is important and of course we've seen there's sires of mothers like sires that have consistently produced great producers like dory he's been a phenomenal maternal sire we have seen so many of his daughters be phenomenal producers that have changed the trajectory of the cutting horse industry and so So it's not that the sire of a mare doesn't come into play because it definitely does. But that maternal side is really important.

Soundness issues, fertility struggles, these are, could be the whole podcast episode themselves. But I can tell you that I find a lot of fertility issues a lot of times go back to mismanagement and soundness issues. So a lot of times when we have a mare come here that they say, I haven't been able to get her bread. Soundness and health-wise, a lot of times, I mean, I would say probably 75 to 80 percent of the time, we can make some changes here when those mares get here, whether it's putting them on previcox or different shoeing or just a feed program that's worth feeding your mare and not just putting her on your local coastal hay that's in a round bell feeder that's muddy and gross. That right there is sometimes the difference we need for a mare that's a hard breeder that all of a sudden is fine to breed.

She just needed a little bit of nutritional help or they haven't gotten an embryo over two years. Well, she's navicular and. Rotated and maybe some shoes with wedges will help. And they do. And they make that mare feel good. Well, stress is the biggest thing that will make you have a terrible breeding season. Stress on a mare, whether it's a recent mare or a donor mare. What can we do to make this mare feel comfortable? That is the first thing I'm going to look at when we say we have a mare that has fertility issues. The next thing I'm going to look at with fertility issues is, is this mare an easy keep her? Do we think she's got some Cushing's? Do we think that she's got some thyroid issues?

That's a huge deal. So I don't want your mare to come to me 300 pounds overweight, but it's almost worse when she comes 300 pounds overweight, because usually if that's the case, they do have some thyroid issues, and that's a battle we have to fight that takes a little while to win. It's fightable. It's something that we can win at, but it takes very structured support from the team that we have in the barn to make sure those mares get a very specific set of medications, set of exercise, depending on, you know, if they're sound or not, that the shoeing is done on time every time, that the vet sees them, keeps them injected, like. There are mares here that probably were really, not probably, that were very hard to breed for a couple years that do live here full time now that we get along just fine with now just from the care.

And that doesn't mean they have to come here to do that. You can do it at home. But if you're not going to do it at home, you either need to sell that mare or send her somewhere because you're just spinning your wheels. So, you know, Cushing's and thyroid issues and foundered mares and things like that, I would say is probably 75 to 80 percent of fertility struggles. Falls into one of those. It's less about the mare's actual fertility and her ability to breed or cycling or all of that. Most of the time, the issues with fertility are secondary to an issue with a thyroid or nutrition or a mare that's sore. Now, of course, we're going to have those mares, a quarter of those mares that we're saying are tough breeders or tough breeders, and there's a lot of things that we can do here to help them.

But having a skilled repro vet is extremely important for that. So those are some of the red flags I look at when I'm looking for a mare or looking at a mare. Now, does that mean that a red flag means I'm not going to buy them? Absolutely not. There's mares that we buy that we know have thyroid issues. No problem. We put them on thyroid medicine. They do great. It's not a no-go for us at all. In fact, if they tell me like, hey, you just keep her on Previcox, keep her shod this way and keep her on Percent. Great. You've already figured it all out. Probably when she gets here, she's ready to go. So it's definitely not something that's a total turnoff for me in any way at all. It's just something that we keep in mind. It depends on the buyer.

You have to decide how much work you're willing to put in if you're going to keep those mares at home to keep them maintained. Otherwise, you just shouldn't buy those kind of mares because they do take a little extra TLC. But it seems like most of the time those are the great ones. And we're always happy to do that here. We buy a lot of mares like that and bring them here and get them straightened out and have had a lot of good babies from those kind of mares that other people just weren't willing to put the time into. They just didn't have the time or the facilities or the help or whatever to really make sure those mares had every opportunity to be good producers that year and be healthy and feel good. So.

Like I said, any of those things, no production record, shallow pedigree depth, soundness issues, fertility struggles, all of that, those are, when I say they're red flags, they're more like caution tape. You should think of them like caution tape. They're something that you need to put in there, may factor into that mare's price, but for a price, we can deal with any of those things. And so, yeah, all those things may discount that mare a little bit, but they also might allow you to purchase a mare that you could have never been able to afford before, whatever it may be, because she, you know, one of those red flags is waving and you can say, hey, that's fine with me. I know how to get around that.

No problem. And I'm going to buy a better mare than I could afford that didn't have any of those, that caution tape around it. So here we've had to be, it's so low, like Ty and I have just kind of had to make, to build a program based off of what we could afford at the time. And sometimes all we could afford was a 20-year-old mare that was a great producer but hadn't had babies in two years and wasn't being well-maintained and we could afford her. So we bought her and put our sweat equity in and got her straight and had a lot of great babies out of her. I know of one I can think of off the top of my head that we gave... 7,500 for probably back in 2016, 2017. And she hadn't had a foal in two years. They hadn't been able to get any embryos out of her.

She'd produced well over 500,000. And that mare went on to once we got her straightened out and figured out and we seed and flushed her actually, got her shoeing right. Her teeth were terrible. We did her teeth. They had to do her teeth three times just to get her where her teeth, she could chew appropriately. And once we got all that sorted out, that was in 2016. She was old then. She was probably 19 years, 20 years old then. She's still alive. We've sold her since, but we had her for a couple of years and got some really good babies out of her. She's produced almost a million dollars now. She's still alive and she's still having multiple babies a year. And they were going to put her down before they brought her to the sale.

So that just goes to show you that if you're willing to put in the sweat equity and that's what we had to do to build our program, a lot of times you can get those kind of mares like that. We wouldn't have been able to afford that mare that was a half a million dollar producer if she came with two embryos and had babies and all of that. So it's kind of cool to think back on some of those situations like that, but I hope that gives everybody a little encouragement that you can play at every level. If you want to play at the elite level, if you're willing to buy one of these mares with a little age on them that need a little maintenance, that's okay. And if you're trying to play at that mid-market level, there's a lot of really big, pretty strong, nice mares you can buy that maybe don't have the maternal side that you would love to see, but they're the right kind of mare.

They're big and strong and good made and big pretty eye and all that. We can buy those mares for really reasonable and that a lot of times makes a lot of sense to build a program around. So just depending on what the outcome you're looking for from your program. That's just some insight on breeding and how we make breeding decisions. It's a lot of people who. I think that one thing I feel like with Ty, whether it's me or Ty or Don Ham or Matt Whitman or Evan Moffitt that's here, all of us tag team everybody to kind of, you know, we have our different customers and we all hit different parts of the different disciplines. And when we can advise you guys on the breeding, just know there's so many different levels you can play at.

But everybody that plays at the, we bought a $5,000 mare level up to the $500,000 mare level, we can have just as much fun with both parties here, raising really cool foals, giving people a positive experience. So don't think that because you have a mare that's not a six-digit mare that you can't play and have fun in this game because you can have a ton of fun with that kind of a mare. So I hope that kind of encourages people to get in this breeding game. There's a spot for everybody and it's just getting the opportunities are just getting cooler and cooler every day with all the different incentive opportunities and money to be won and so I hope you guys will get in and play if you'll have any questions after our last podcast we had a ton of calls we talked to a lot of people I did Ty did Don did everybody here did about just breeding questions that's what we're here for so call our office call Ty or Don or I and we'll walk you through those processes.

We're happy to help you find a mare. If you're looking at embryos or something like that in our cell or mares, we're happy to advise you based off of your goals. Once you know your goals, we're happy to advise you on, you know, this is what we would suggest and you can take that or leave it, but that's what we're here for. So if you have any questions, reach out to us and I hope everybody has a great breeding season and best of luck to all of you.