Question For My Fellow Mixer People

[Jo Ferris]

So, as you all know, the past several years I’ve leased out out a large portion of my mares at auction. This was to help me keep my numbers down in my racing barn. I’m considering a change though and I’m curious what everyone thinks on this.

Would you rather:
Continue with the mare lease auctions which usually consist of 100-150 mares formidable+.

Or try a change, I LOVE breeding, but not so much training and racing which is why I’m always overwhelmed with the amount of yearlings and runners I have, 100 runners is what I’ve found to be my absolute max that I can handle, horses start falling through the cracks around 70-80 runners. I’d prefer to have 40-50 tops, even with how many I lease I always tend to find mares and breed about 100 per year because I have a problem
My proposed change is I breed all my mares then sell a good portion of the foals, obviously I would keep a select few for myself for future broodmare/stallion prospects and just to race a few myself, but I wouldn’t keep many, perhaps 30 or so per year and probably wouldn’t put the “bad” ones up for auction, just send those ones to pasture and forget about them

Or do a mixture of both?

Let me know your thoughts, obviously I care quite a bit about what everyone’s thoughts are considering if I go through with breeding and selling foals, that will become the main income for my stable and if I end up with 250+ unsold foals I WILL lose my mind completely

If you have any ideas please explain either here or PM me. If you select other, please explain

[Ali Sills]

I picked the option of breeding and selling foals. Especially with the gallop comments going away, I think we will see this more AND then you can breed 'em and sell 'em without getting stressed out about workouts, equipment, etc.

[Jo Ferris]

I picked the option of breeding and selling foals. Especially with the gallop comments going away, I think we will see this more AND then you can breed 'em and sell 'em without getting stressed out about workouts, equipment, etc.

Thanks for the input!

I’m kinda leaning towards trying this out this year, breeding all my mares, selling some as foals, some as yearlings and some as 2yos and see how it goes, kinda experiment with it. I really miss breeding hundreds of mares like I used to back when I had RL time. It’s really hard to gauge which is best because, for the most part, us mixer people don’t sell our (good) young horses, I literally have no clue which is most appealing. I don’t really care if I make money off the foals, I’d enjoy the game more I think if I mostly bred mares and sold their foals, but would appreciate at least coming close to breaking even so ya know, I don’t go bankrupt I’ll probably settle on a mix of leases and selling youngsters, but I just really miss breeding and have learned over the past few months especially I can’t keep up with racing many horses, really wanna get down to no more than 50 runners at a time.