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It's where the mare's quality is not as good as the stallions of the same generation, due to stallion testing being more rigorous than mare testing.

It’s generally a collective term. It’s hard to tell at a glance which mares in a group (usually a generation group whether that be by symmetrical pedigree generation or paper generation) are of lesser quality than their peers, and since Comparison Testing doesn’t exist for mares you can’t tell that way.

There are a variety of ways to combat it but I can think of 4 main ones off the top of my head.

Pasture breeding, utilizing all of part of the pasture bonus, is one way to combat mare lag. This will cause mares to throw foals from the top end of their Breeding Ability Range, which may be more in keeping with their slightly superior stallion partner’s range.

Breeding “evenly” by paper (yellow/C, Red/B, Blue/A, Gold/Star) is another. This is usually in contrast to either Bootstrap or Benchmark/symmetrical generation breeding.

Culling active broodmares by AFPT is another method. Average Foal Performance Test score has long been an officially recognized indicator of the breeding ability of a parent. In general you want to compare AFPTs between a group of similar mares, bred to the same or a similar stallion, with the same amount of pasture bonus, and with at least 3 foals. The Premium Upgrade automatically calculates AFPT for all living, tested foals. If you don’t have this upgrade, you can calculate it for yourself by adding all the PTs up and dividing the total by the number of tested foals. Then cull the bottom X # of mares as suits your program, or develop a cut off and cull any mares below that cut off.

The final method is more of a way to quickly increase your mare quality than a way to combat mare lag—Bootstrap Breeding can move your mares up the paper levels much faster than even paper or symmetrical breeding. In Bootstrapping you breed whatever mares you have to the very best Star stallion you can get access to. You test the colts and allow them all to be snipped, but you keep the fillies intact and use them to breed back to their father or a similar quality stallion when they are old enough. After a few “generations” of this, even starting with Yellow quality mares, you should start to read Gold papered mare quality for at least some of your fillies.

If any of this doesn’t make sense, please don’t hesitate to ask for clarification.

Ahhh ok that makes sense.

I just tried the pasture breeding for the first time and I got my first foal that failed it’s breeding inspection and was fixed.

Does breeding even only apply to papers and not PT scores? And is this how folks get more intact offspring? Or am I misreading this whole breeding even thing entirely?

Ahhhhhhh!!!! Ok that clears things up pretty well. I’ve had a hard time discerning how each thing effects what between breeding and showing.