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If you breed Star papered stallions to Gold papered mares and A papered stallions to your Blue mares you might have better luck. PLUS use the pastures! The breeding boosts your mares get are invaluable! Pasture boosted Blue mares might be a better cross on your Star stallions.

When bootstrapping (breeding high star studs to low gold, blue, or even red and yellow mares) you're going to be getting foals that (on average) are better than the mares, but they still won't quite be up to the quality of the stud. That means they probably won't pass BA/SBA, as the advice testing compares the foal to both parents.

For most of us bootstrappers, we SBA the colts (I keep all of mine for show ponies because you can never have too many show ponies, but some people cull on PT) and then we leave the fillies untouched by BA, but we paper them. For this reason, bootstrapping can be a little more expensive than even paper/line breeding (where you can freely SBA everything indiscriminately). You compare the paper of the fillies to the paper of the dams to see if you have improvement instead of using BA to see if you have improvement.

Eventually, if you keep using the same stud, you may hit a generation where more than half the colts pass BA/SBA (or at least a large percentage). At that point, you probably have all gold mares, and you may be able to return to BA/SBA for the fillies, as the intact rate should match that of the colts.


And as a side note, a good recommendation of snipped to intact ratio is three or more show ponies for every one breeder. That will help you with a good amount of income to support that breeding every season. :)

Also if you want more intacts you should start with a lower generation herd.

By matching generation and papers you reduce the variance of quality between the mare and stud and give the foal a better chance at being as good as or better than both parents.

The higher generations typically have great studs but the mares quality starts to lag because we only need a few studs to breed a lot of mares so are stricter on them while most people let their mares be with only basic restrictions. Therefore the foals have to be much better than their dams to even get close to the sires quality so end up getting snipped by breeding advice.

I did a huge reorganization last November/ December and added about 200 new foundation mares to both servers. Here I only have one pasture so have been rotating my foundation mares through for as much bonus as I can get them but it’s been difficult with a busy summer in real life to continue to keep remembering to breed and switch. So my other generations haven’t grown much.

On HJ1 though i started out with similar numbers in each generation I have a pile of pastures so all my mares fit in. They’re organized by generation then line (I breed KP and nexus/axiom) the lower generations are now stuffed into multiple 100 acre pastures while my higher generations barely fill a 30 acre.

I have a poor lonely 7th Gen mare who turned 13 this season and will be the first season I’ve bred her live. She was 8 before I bred other intact mares in her generation and 10 before I finally bred a intact stud to cover her and he’s finally old enough to breed this month. I have no expectations that any in that pasture will actually produce an intact foal but I’m ok with that.

I keep all my show horses and they cover all the fees for breeding, showing, new barns or GMT’s that I want. All my horses outside of the pastures have 210 stalls for each generation and 1000 stall barns for show horses (here I still have a mishmash of stall sizes because I haven’t been consistently breeding enough to fill any barns up but my show horses are in 1000 stall barns)

I use SBA on everything and then go to town snipping my numbers down farther based on consistency and colour. Along with comparison testing on the remaining boys. It’s not unusual for me to have a season that I’ve bred 450+ foals and only kept 20 or less intact.