A spring unlike any other: unmasking the challenge of the 2022 breeding season

Cover image courtesy of Bronwen Healy

With the arrival of December, much of the covering season has wrapped up for another year, but something has been afoot across the farms of Australasia. Fertility numbers are seemingly down, albeit unofficially at this point, and it’s been a persistent conversation among breeders these last short months.

As a result, the overall foal crop next year may be down. Farms are reporting mares requiring two and three covers, and numbers not achieving pregnancy at all. Logistically, many breeders have been on the road with returns all season.

None of this spells a disastrous breeding season by any means, but it is looking like an unusually challenging one.

For those in the industry, every season presents its challenges, but in close to 40 years of breeding thoroughbreds, Arrowfield Studmaster John Messara can’t remember a covering season like it.

“Unexplainably to us, our fertility this year per cycle has been well below last year’s, or any previous year’s actually,” he said. “Even our most fertile stallions, who are consistently very fertile, have sometimes had to serve their mares two and three times.”

Traditionally, this isn’t a conversation that studmasters want to have on the record, but the facts of this season are fairly black and white to Messara. This isn’t an Arrowfield problem; it’s a problem that’s seemingly affected many farms in the industry this spring.

“There is something that is causing it and none of us know what it is,” he said. “We’ve checked our stallions, we’ve checked our stallions’ sperm and we’ve checked our systems. We haven’t found any reason for it so all we can turn to is the weather, the rain and the wet ground this year, and while we can’t even link those things to it clearly, there’s really no other variable that we can see.”

Arrowfield is one of the largest commercial breeders in Australia. It stands many fertile stallions who, in one way or another, and unexplainably, have each been affected by numbers this spring. He also knows his farm isn’t the only one.

“We started noticing something wasn’t right after the first month of covering,” he said. “We could see that even the most fertile horses we had were returning lower figures than they historically have, and we thought it might have been the rain and that the mares weren’t cycling, but the mares were cycling. They were ready and prepared to be covered, so that wasn’t it. We waited for things to brighten up but it didn’t really get any better.”

Messara doesn’t have statistics yet on what Arrowfield’s fertility numbers will be this season. His stallions ceased covering just a few days ago, but anecdotally, he said a higher than normal number of mares, both Arrowfield-owned and client-owned, didn’t get in foal at all.

“It was definitely a disappointing season across the board overall,” he said. “We know our horses are fine because we checked the sperm constantly and we look at all the dismount samples. We do everything that’s got to be done, and we have the same team in the barn as last year and the year before, and even the year before that.

“There are a lot of constants there so I can’t see the reason for it and it’s very frustrating. I’ve spoken to other farms who have said it’s been a very, very odd year.”

The boutique breeder

In the Southern Highlands south of Sydney, the Ricky Surace-owned B2B Thoroughbreds has had, like Arrowfield and like its many neighbours, an unusual breeding season.

When we checked in with Ricky Surace Jnr this week, the operation’s racing manager, he said it’s been a season to remember logistically with a large bulk of B2B's 37 mares needing to return to stallions two and three times since September.

“We’ve been up and down the road with horses, which can be a real headache,” he said. “Suddenly you’re paying a week-and-a-half of agistment somewhere else and the mares aren’t getting in foal, and then you need to go again so it’s definitely upped our costs this year.

“That mixed with fuel prices, it’s costing us $300 just to get up to the Hunter Valley. Logistically, it’s all been a real headache and, as far as seasons go, this one’s only been okay at best.”

Like Arrowfield, the B2B mares have all been cycling properly, so it's a mystery to Surace as to what's going on.

“All of these mares who have never had a problem were suddenly missing once or even twice,” he said. “Who knows? It could be a weather element because we really can’t come up with what else it could be.”

From boutique numbers, B2B wouldn’t want anything above 20 per cent in numbers of mares not in foal each season. Of those 20 per cent, the majority are usually mares that had late foals and were therefore rested for a season.

“This year, we didn’t intend for certain mares to have a year off but we’ve been forced to, in a way,” Surace Jnr said. “There’s not much else that it could be down to outside of the weather, and weather has affected a lot of things.

“It’s affected the pastures, which are now really rich, and our access to good hay. Could that have an effect on stallion fertility and mare cycling? Probably.”

One of the interesting facts about B2B’s season has been the particularly challenging fertility issues its mares experienced in Victoria.

“Every single mare we sent to Victoria this season missed at least once, if not twice,” Surace Jnr said. “And that’s every stallion we used across all farms, stallions that have very good fertility. For us, going south has been way worse this year than going north to the Hunter Valley.”

Surace Jnr sent eight mares to Victoria, which would account for just over 20 per cent of the farm’s breeding population this spring. Although their numbers are statistically small, to run into problems with each of those eight mares has posed a significant issue.

“There are plenty of numbers that have been floating around about the covering season,” he said, “numbers specific to certain stallions not getting their first 50 mares in foal, or another getting only five out of 50 in foal. These are massive figures to be talking about. I have no doubt that foal crops are going to be down 20 per cent come yearling time in a couple of years.”

The fallout

In Australia, the foal crop has been dropping consistently for a number of years. Many commercial breeders will tell you it needed to.

Since 2017, the number of live foals has crept down from 13,151 in 2017 to 12,768 last year, a drop of 383. The overall number of returns has decreased with it, while the live foals/coverings percentage has remained steady enough at a 65 per cent average.

While any numbers out of this season won’t be dramatically different to other years, they will probably be different nonetheless, which begs the question of what the consequences might be down the line.

“Forty per cent of the horses bred in this country are bred in New South Wales,” Messara said. “Most of them are in and around the Hunter, and if what we’re experiencing at Arrowfield is being felt around the region, which I’m pretty sure it is, it will mean something like 500 less horses emerging out of this crop.”

The foal-crop difference between 2021 and 2020 was 54 horses, so if there are 500 fewer horses next spring, that’s a very considerable dearth from one season to the next.

“You’ll have less horses available for the sale ring,” Messara said. “That, in itself, isn’t a bad thing because there are many that aren’t finding their place in sales at the moment, but the sales will certainly be impacted. Field sizes will be affected down the line too.”

For Messara, who likes answers, the 2022 breeding season is a conundrum. He is curious to know why his numbers are down, especially when all the veterinary evidence is reading healthy and there’s no apparent reason for mares not getting in foal.

“I haven’t had a season like this in nearly 40 years, since I got going in 1985,” he said.

In a few weeks, when all of the season’s returns are in, Messara and his staff will be doing a deep dive into the possible causes of this year’s abnormal stats.

“When all the numbers are in, we’re going to compare area to area, dry mares’ to wet mares’ results, and we’re going to compare what results we got from mares sent to outside stallions as against those that went to our stallions,” he said. “We’re going to virtually look at every single comparison that we can make in relation to areas, age and every other variable that we can, and see how things line up with past years.

“Invariably, we get around the same fertility every year, or around 85 per cent. We’re going to end up with less than that this year. I can’t say exactly what that number will be yet, but it will be less than that and there’s no obvious reason so can see for it.”

Nature has its way?

In New Zealand, the master of Waikato Stud, Mark Chittick, has noticed a similarly unusual breeding season off the back of a long, damp 2022.

“It’s definitely been similar down here,” he said, speaking to TDN AusNZ. “Up until about a month ago, I would have said it was a reasonably typical New Zealand season, but as always we have pretty short memories because the last two years, particularly last year, were incredible, and that made the job easier.”

For Chittick, perspective is everything, and in accounting for lower returns or a large number of repeat covers this spring, he puts it down to environmental factors. Like Arrowfield, all the boxes are meticulously ticked at Waikato Stud when it comes to stallion fertility and mare health, so what else could it be?

“These mares, they’ve got to have sunlight,” he said. “They’ve got to have good sunshine and they’ve got to be warm. They’ve got to have that good, positive feeling that we all get when we get out in the sun and, to be honest, we just haven’t had that with the weather this year.”

Like much of the Australian eastern seaboard, the Waikato has suffered above-average rainfall. Daily variances jump from 25 degrees and blue skies to jeans and jumpers once more. In other words, there’s been very little consistency all spring, and while the number of repeat covers was irregular on previous years at Waikato Stud, there's been an additional symptom of a less-than-normal season.

“When you’re getting mares at their first scan and you’re getting a lot or a number of sets of twins in that first scan, absolutely everything is aligned and firing,” Chittick said. “Your protein in your grass, your sunlight hours, the mares are producing more follicles.

“Last year, we went close to saying one in three or four mares were scanning with a set of twins, and that was from around 600 mares. This year, we served pretty close to 700 mares and I would say we’ve been very lucky if it was 50 sets of twins at that first scan. That has been the biggest determining factor for me.”

Chittick is fairly holistic in his approach to seasons like this. He’s not too worried about subsequent foal numbers because swings and roundabouts are a common occurrence in the long game of breeding thoroughbreds.

“I’m a great believer that it always works its way out,” he said. “When you get less mares in foal, the next year you have less mares slip or abort during the off-season, and you have less problems in the foaling paddock, so it always equals its way out.

“I really think, in the end, nature has its way. There might be less mares in foal but you probably end up with the same amount of live foals in the end.”

Whether that happens in 2023 remains to be seen, and how individual farms handle the cards dealt this spring will also vary.

Tomorrow in TDN AusNZ, we’ll be taking a look at the veterinary element of the 2022 covering season, questioning if environmental factors might have been at play this year to explain the difficulties that breeders may have experienced.