A Look Into My Year 65 Foal Crop

Original article written by Serenity Sky posted 5 months 0 weeks ago

The end of the 65th year of the SIM has come upon us, and with that, it brought Festivus. Many trainers were either relieved to find that their foal crops had brought strong, worthy colts and fillies, or they were disappointed in their mediocre foals and will be looking forward into the next year.

In the 65th year, personally, my 5th year of breeding, I was rather proud of the foals I had produced. I bred 185 Thoroughbred foals, and no mixer babies. Despite having purchased a few mixer mares that year, I had not been well enough informed to feel comfortable attempting to breed them – not to say that I’m very comfortable even breeding Thoroughbreds, yet, as I still have much to learn and plenty of research to do before I will ever achieve the ranks of a top breeder and trainer. I also frequently took breaks throughout the year due to personal life circumstances, and was unable to apply as much time as I had wanted, thus resulting in less cash earnings, meaning less cash for me to spend on handsome studs.

This foal crop gave me a heavy crop of new fillies – a whopping 102 fillies and 83 colts. Of the 83 colts, only 20 remained intact (not that I’m expecting all 20 of them to ever make it to the breeding shed), while the other 63 were gelded, simply for being productive and lower.

A more impressive foal crop, this year’s crop brought about 7 stakes galloping yearlings, 34 allowances, 69 productives, 35 solids, 40 claimers, and not a single different career. In my barn, I consider productives and up the more mid- and top-tier horses. Based on this statement, I produced a nice 59.5% of mid- and top-tier yearlings by my standards – still with the potential for more to increase in ratings.

Of the 185 yearlings, 102 galloped as late bloomers and have the highest potential to improve. 55 yearlings galloped progressive, and only 28 galloped at peak performance. This is another proud statistic of mine. 55% of my foals have great potential for improvement, including 4 of my stakes yearlings that galloped as late bloomers, 21 allowance late bloomers and 35 productive late bloomers. We had 2 stakes progressives, 7 allowance progressives, 25 productive progressives, only 1 stakes peak, 6 allowance peaks, and 9 productive peaks.

118 of these foals were bred out of one of our own standing studs, Lionheart. Lionheart gave us 18 allowance yearlings, 45 productives, 20 solids, and 35 claimers. Despite him not being a top stud, we are still proud of the statistics he gave us and are grateful for all of his yearlings. We are also pleased that based on these stats, it seems as though our crosses with the top listed studs with our mares seemed to heavily work out in our favor. Had we bred more of our mares to more top studs, we are sure we would have certainly seen higher numbers. However, we are not upset about the yearlings we have, as we still expect great things from them, even if they don’t seem like much to a more experienced horse owner.

Although there were no freak foals produced, I have high hopes that at least one of my stakes late bloomers will run as a freak either next year or by their third year. As of yet, this has been my best foal crop to date and I am proud of the foals that we have produced. We can only hope to expect even better foal crops as we earn more money to spend on some of the top studs, do more research into better crosses and pedigrees, and breed even more of our mares. We did not even breed half of our mares last season, and we can only imagine what we would have achieved had we bred all of them.

How did your foal crops fare this year? Are you proud of your up-and-coming yearlings? Will your disappointment fuel your desire to be better for next year?

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