The ultimate planning tool: Streamlining your breeding decisions with the Pedigrees 360 Mating Plan

Cover image courtesy of Pedigree 360

Every feature of Pedigrees 360 starts from the same question: what would make a breeder or bloodstock agent's life easier? This was front of mind for the team when developing the new look to the program’s Matings Hub, highlighted by an expanded Mating Plan that offers you multiple ways to discover the stallions that could match your mares.

“The original Matings Hub began as a way to speed up bulk mating assessments,” said Pedigrees 360’s Pete Howard. “The upgraded Mating Plan feature takes it further, processing dozens of potential matings in seconds allowing analysis of them side by side.”

For the breeder who wants to look deeper and compare faster, Pedigrees 360’s suite of tools deliver just that.

Putting together the ultimate Mating Plan

The Mating Plan tool offers multiple ways to build plans, starting from selecting multiple mares to compare across the same group of stallions, and giving you multiple ways to narrow your sire shortlist down.

A single Mating Plan can contain up to 200 matings at a time - for example, 20 mares can be compared against 10 stallions at once - offering the breeder impressive flexibility at the click of a button.

Before beginning the Mating Plan, the breeder can make their own lists under the My Horses tab and select a list to add directly to the plan, or individually select mares to go in the same plan. Studs and agents can create lists for what certain clients own, mares who might suit stallions they have equity in, or easily grade their stock into different categories to send to different levels of stallions.

“The goal was never to add features for their own sake,” said Howard. “It was to close the gap between a quick pedigree check and a genuine mating decision.”

The stallion selection is where things get particularly interesting. Pedigrees 360’s stallion search has 11 ways to search for stallions, plus the ability to directly search for individual stallions to include. Breeders can filter stallions by service fee, season at stud, height, winners to runners ratio, and stakes winners to runner ratio, offering more ways to discover what the market has on offer.

“The stallion search function has been a big addition,” said Howard. “As one commercial breeder using the tool put it, ‘I don't just need the tool to tell me what I already know, I need it to catch what I might miss’.”

There are four ways to narrow stallions down by location; breeders can select the country, state, or stud the potential stallion is standing at, or simply put in the location of their mares and place a limit on how far away they wish to send those mares.

The last, and perhaps most compelling, feature of the stallion selection is the Ancestor Search, which can be used in several ways. Breeders can search for an ancestor, select whether it appears in the damline, sireline, or on either side of the stallion’s pedigree, and - crucially - whether they want to include or exclude stallions from the pool.

They can also select what generations they want that ancestor to either appear or not appear, adding a whole new layer to the stallion search process. Breeders can add several rules if they want to further refine what they are putting on the page.

“Ancestor inclusion and exclusion came from a very practical need,” Howard said. “Breeders often know exactly which sire or mare lines they want to reinforce, and just as often, which ones they want to steer clear of. The tool now allows breeders to designate exact generations that they want to include or exclude specific ancestors.”

Sometimes, breeders might find that a desirable sire is filtered out by this process, whether it be a sire they would consider travelling further to access or one whose statistics sit outside of the search range. It is simple enough to add these horses back into the equation through the individual Stallion Search.

This tool also offers a chance to look to the future with the ability to add colts still on the race track.

Getting into the finer details

The Mating Plan can analyse one mating combination a second, so you are waiting just minutes to have full-scale, in-depth matings at your fingertips.

Before finalising each plan, the breeder gets to review the hypothetical matings for each mare and stallion combination, and see what is working and what’s not. Matings can be removed, reordered, and sorted on whether the combined pedigree analysis is better if the resultant foal is a colt or a filly.

The quick snapshot for each mating shows how the linebreeding reinforcement of desirable traits ranks, and how that mating stacks up by winners and stakes winners to runners. Breeders can rate each mating, reorder the plan by any aspect, and add comments on specific elements to remember or show to clients.

By clicking on each combination, the breeder can preview what elements of the pedigree are working and what suggests less than desirable results. Pedigrees 360’s analysis measures eight desirable traits in the potential foal’s pedigree and where they originate from, going as deep as nine generations and analysing the sex balance for influential stallions and mares on both sides of the pedigree.

The more green dots in a mating’s profile, the better, giving breeders an easy visual depiction of how the pedigree rates. These elements are static and not affected by performance, because they originate deep within the pedigrees of the sire and dam.

Each mating snapshot also summarises statistics for the stallion and mare, putting all of the key information in one place. No more swapping between paper notes and multiple tabs, when everything you could need to know is all in one place.

“Breeders don't just want to see a standard pedigree tree,” Howard said. “They want to see the sire and broodmare lines, alongside the physical and performance data for the mating, so we rebuilt the tool to show all of it together.” The snapshot for each member of the mating has all the key information to aid your decision.

Feedback has already been extremely positive on the Mating Plan’s utility and ease of understanding by Pedigrees 360 clients. All of the information you want is there, in a simple, easy to understand format.

“More than one bloodstock agent mentioned wanting to share a mating plan with a client in a format that included all of the data in a simple output. That's what pushed us to rework the report layout.”

There is no one true method to breed a winner, nevermind a champion, but the depth and scope of Pedigrees 360’s analysis gives you as much information as you could possibly desire to make an informed decision.

Year-round utility

What Pedigrees 360 has to offer year-round benefits further than just the breeding season.

In your own horse hub, it is possible to make your own custom horses and prepare hypothetical matings with them. This allows breeders to contemplate what stock they might want to retain, and get a preview of what matings could be on offer for that horse when they finally enter stud.

Another useful resource is the sales catalogues, which allows you to peruse the pedigrees of horses sold or on offer this year and use the Pedigrees 360 analysis to view how they stack up. Older catalogues can be purchased in the Pedigrees 360 marketplace.

All of the same important information from the Mating Plan is on offer for each horse, and you can even see how hypothetical matings would stack up to further inform your purchasing decisions.

If you are thinking of breeding this season, whether you have one mare or 20, there is no tool that goes deeper and looks further - and delivers that analysis faster - than Pedigrees 360.

If you want to get a taste of what Pedigrees 360 has to offer, you can try a five-day free trial of the technology, where you can run up to 20 hypothetical matings and compare two mares against stallion lists provided by Pedigrees 360.