HGG Community Forums

One way is to go ahead and cull those inferior stallions you’re breeding just because they’re the only stallion you have for that line/gen right now. You’re just producing inferior stock from them you’ll have to cull later...quit breeding them.

Cull the lines that don’t fit what you want to breed for —the General lines. Unless you’re in love with the quality you’re getting and you’re working the majority of the foals into your specific lines, get rid of them.

Are your snowflake and black appy lines really that different? Can you combine them?

As we progress in in the game, a lot of us start to cull mares by AFPT. Average Foal PT score takes all of a given mare’s foals and averages their PT (Premium Upgrade does it automatically, but you can do it manually). Most of us want our mares to have at least 3 foals on the ground before we look at this number and then we compare all the mares in a given cohort (so for you, perhaps by line and generation? Or maybe by generation in general?) and culls either the lowest X% or sets a cut off and culls everything under it.

Remember to compare apples to apples here—so same generation, same quality of stallion as father of the foals, same amount of pasture bonus.

If you have been auctioning a lot of foals and not keeping track of their PT scores, your AFPTs may be artificially high for some mares, especially if you have a PT cut off to keep foals.

Another thing to think about is to abandon your line breeding for a season and instead do a season with a major high Star Bootstrap and keep all the foals as show ponies. You’ll get a batch of high PT foals that way and get a jump on your show pony herd...but that only works if you have the room to keep them!