Breeding Projects

[Phoenix123]

So I'm thinking of starting my first breeding project which is to hopefully breed some NAB's with higher HGP's and better breeder's reports than the usual.

Before I start I would like to get some advice from more experienced players on how to do this and see if it's actually possible or not as I have no idea

Any help is appreciated, thank you all x

[BlackOak2]

So I'm thinking of starting my first breeding project which is to hopefully breed some NAB's with higher HGP's and better breeder's reports than the usual.

Before I start I would like to get some advice from more experienced players on how to do this and see if it's actually possible or not as I have no idea

Any help is appreciated, thank you all x

Of course it's possible.

I'd suggest fleshing out exactly what you're looking for in your project. Is it just higher HGP's and BR's? Is it some specific color? What base level HGP are you aiming for? 45k? 60K?

AC NAB's come with a large option of color mixes. So if you want to favor a color gene or keep away from a color gene (or color combination) you should make the decision early, because once you're way deep into your project, changing something can be... well, difficult can be an understatement.

Also, consider making a couple goals during it as well. For higher HGP, you could make your first goal 50HGP. And once you achieve that, you'll pause in your project and eject anything with... say under 45 HGP and any red comments.

At your goalposts (and at select 'feeling' spots during your project) you'll want to pause and tighten your 'keep' criteria.
At first, keep your fillies 'keep' rather lax. When you find you're keeping more than one or two colts per generation, find the mare that's throwing the best colts (per your criteria) and keep only those colts from her. Make all your other mares throw you the fillies you want to keep. Then tighten your criteria again and start again from that.

Since you've been providing great grinder stock, you should know what it takes to make a breed competitive. It's not really too different from creating and maintaining grinder stock. But to make competitive stock, from scratch, you'll want to aim at building the hard genes up to a certain level (somewhere between 45k and 60k HGP) and then work on their conformation scores to spread that beautiful icing on your cake ... er... project.
Picking a discipline early can help to hone your stock toward it before that point, but if you don't necessarily have a discipline in mind, you can make them generalists. All that really entails is breeding heart into the bloodline and checking them on occasion to make sure it stays. Having a horse that's already proven, competitively, is useful for maintaining or even giving heart back. So keeping one or a couple on a board account for maintenance or future development is always handy.

As a last note, you have two basic options for improving the NAB's. One is from scratch, which, of course, takes time (and outlined basically above). The other, is keeping proven competitors on a board account and using that blood to boost your NAB's in just a couple generations into what you want.

Both are viable options. What it comes down to, is which option do you want to use and how much effort do you want to put into the project.

[Phoenix123]

So I'm thinking of starting my first breeding project which is to hopefully breed some NAB's with higher HGP's and better breeder's reports than the usual.

Before I start I would like to get some advice from more experienced players on how to do this and see if it's actually possible or not as I have no idea

Any help is appreciated, thank you all x

Of course it's possible.

I'd suggest fleshing out exactly what you're looking for in your project. Is it just higher HGP's and BR's? Is it some specific color? What base level HGP are you aiming for? 45k? 60K?

AC NAB's come with a large option of color mixes. So if you want to favor a color gene or keep away from a color gene (or color combination) you should make the decision early, because once you're way deep into your project, changing something can be... well, difficult can be an understatement.

Also, consider making a couple goals during it as well. For higher HGP, you could make your first goal 50HGP. And once you achieve that, you'll pause in your project and eject anything with... say under 45 HGP and any red comments.

At your goalposts (and at select 'feeling' spots during your project) you'll want to pause and tighten your 'keep' criteria.
At first, keep your fillies 'keep' rather lax. When you find you're keeping more than one or two colts per generation, find the mare that's throwing the best colts (per your criteria) and keep only those colts from her. Make all your other mares throw you the fillies you want to keep. Then tighten your criteria again and start again from that.

Since you've been providing great grinder stock, you should know what it takes to make a breed competitive. It's not really too different from creating and maintaining grinder stock. But to make competitive stock, from scratch, you'll want to aim at building the hard genes up to a certain level (somewhere between 45k and 60k HGP) and then work on their conformation scores to spread that beautiful icing on your cake ... er... project.
Picking a discipline early can help to hone your stock toward it before that point, but if you don't necessarily have a discipline in mind, you can make them generalists. All that really entails is breeding heart into the bloodline and checking them on occasion to make sure it stays. Having a horse that's already proven, competitively, is useful for maintaining or even giving heart back. So keeping one or a couple on a board account for maintenance or future development is always handy.

As a last note, you have two basic options for improving the NAB's. One is from scratch, which, of course, takes time (and outlined basically above). The other, is keeping proven competitors on a board account and using that blood to boost your NAB's in just a couple generations into what you want.

Both are viable options. What it comes down to, is which option do you want to use and how much effort do you want to put into the project.

Great, thank you so much again x

[BlackOak2]

Anytime!