HGG Community Forums

Pasture Breeding basics:

If you put mares and stallions in a pasture, they will automatically breed the first time you log in after the 14th of the month whether they have the breeding bonus or not. If you don’t want this to happen, don’t put your stallions in the pasture until you’re ready to breed.

Your mares’ 30 day counter begins when you put them in the pasture, regardless of what that date is. It’s up to you to keep up with where your mares are in the counter cycle and when you decide to breed them. I am unclear on exactly how it works when your mares live in the pasture full time and you breed pastures at different times of the month...someone else will need to chime in there. (My mares live in pasture. I’m not sure if they have full bonus all the time once they’ve been there 30 days or if it resets when they are bred. So, if I bred a pasture on the 27th and then bred it again on the 5th, would the mares have full bonus on the second breeding?).

If you pull a mare out of the pasture for ANY reason (not move them directly between pastures, but move them into the barn even for just a second) their counter resets to 0. You have to make the choice between show points and breeding bonus.

Does the breeding bonus really make that much difference? Well, for me it does. I do something like 98% of my breeding in pastures with at least some bonus (I’m not always good about getting my 3 year olds into pastures so that they have the full bonus for their 4 year old year). Even using SBA, I probably have a 50% intact rate for my foundation pastures before culling colt numbers. I probably get a 2-10% rate of “exceptional” foals—so A/Blue for boosted pastures and AGA a for regular pastures with gen 2 foals.

Can you pick what stallions breed to what mares? Only by having multiple pastures going. If you have more than one stallion in a pasture, they will be randomly bred to the mares until all the mares are bred or until the stallions are out of live covers for the season. It doesn’t matter whether you use the “Breed Pastures” button or autobreed for that part.

I personally keep my stallions in the barns so they can earn a living in the show ring except for the couple of minutes a month I need them to breed in the pasture. I breed one pasture at a time and then cull the foals from that pasture before I breed the next one.

I hope that happens. If anything doesn’t make sense, let us know and someone will make another pass at that for you! Sometimes you need to hear something several different ways before someone hits oh a way that clicks for you!

If you never take your mare out she will always have 30+ days recorded so yes she should have full bonus all the time for you whenever you breed her :)