Breeding Horses
Locate the necessities for all your horse breeding needs
Breeding horses is a lucrative business, both for horse breeders and you, if you reap the benefits of the potential foal. By using the right tools, you can garner a successful conception, a healthy pregnancy and a beautiful foal.Horse breeding is also a scientific endeavor. You can peruse a list and buy the sperm of a worthy stallion. You may then decide to designate an especially worthy animal as a broodmare, selling or keeping the offspring to create a new line. Before investing in horse breeding, consider the following:
1. Choose a breeding horses provider for your mares.
2. Secure horse breeding storage equipment and testing kits for your facility.
3. Use technology to your advantage when breeding horses.
Locate the horse breeders for your mares
If you don't have the stallion on or near your property, it's not a problem. Advances in technology allow stallion semen to be shipped from all over the country. You can even search through a list of all the stallions that farms have to offer to choose the one that's best for your mares.
Try: Allendale Farms offers 28 horse breeds to choose from when selecting your stallion. You can contact the owners directly from the breeding horses list. InfoHorse.com is another site where you can locate breeders of any of the numerous horse breeds that interest you.
Purchase horse breeding equipment for your mares
Among horse breeders, artificial insemination is common practice. Every breed registry accepts it minus the thoroughbred. Even if you don't plan to breed your equines on-site, make sure you have the equipment on-hand for when you order the horse semen. Normally sent to you in a labeled, plastic straw and frozen in liquid nitrogen vapor, the semen is then placed in liquid nitrogen containers. One straw is good for one artificial insemination. When sent to you, it's best to place it in your liquid nitrogen container promptly, and keep it in the container until it's needed for insemination. If properly stored, horse semen can last 15 to 20 years.
Try: Select Genetics offers MVE liquid nitrogen tanks and vapor shippers for your horse breeding needs. If you need to ship horse semen, check out its transporters, which come in three different sizes. Tack in the Box sells several pieces of equipment when it comes to breeding. One of the featured products is a foal predictor test kit that you can use to see if your mare will produce a foal in the next 12 hours. With a 95% success rate, you add the mare's milk to a solution to find the answer.
Utilize technology for breeding horses
Horse breeding is an expensive business. If you use technology to your advantage, then you can cut back on unnecessary costs. Used for mares and embryos, technology can eliminate much of the guessing that comes along with equine breeding.
Try: Equine Reproduction Concepts offers full-service embryo transfer programs. Select from five options in dealing with surgical or nonsurgical implantation. Heritage Genetics sells an Ovatec electronic devise that is used to help determine if a mare is ready to be impregnated. Easy-to-use, the wand can improve breeding since it eliminates guessing time on heat cycles. If you're interested in checking on the horse embryo in utero, buy an ultrasound scanner from Exodus Breeders.
- Sign up with national horse breeders' groups, and use resources provided to do your research before you settle on a breed. Millions of horses are listed in registries provided by associations, keeping the breeding horses' information up-to-date for hundreds of years.
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