HGG Community Forums

I have multiple pasture setups, but all my mares stay in pasture once they’re old enough (if they fit the parameters).

My 100ac primary pasture I use for my bootstrap/high performance breeding lines. I have three star stallions who have tested at least AGA my benchmark (in fact, the three I have for this next season all surpassed the benchmark stallion!). The 100 mares I have in the high performance pasture are kept based on papers and PT...so, whenever I get a gold* or high PT blue mare, any red or yellow mares get bumped from the pasture and spelded. Then the higher-papered mare takes her place. The ultimate goal there is to have an entire pasture of gold* mares with v high PT scores, to produce the best show horses possible for my show herd.

My liver, ND1, and XP pastures are all my “focus” pastures. They’re all 30ac pastures with a single stallion, and carefully chosen for desirable traits. All of these pastures are even-bred only, and each mare or stallion must pass SBA and paper higher than the previous gen to make the cut. So my Gen2 XP (exceptionally perfect) horses must all paper blue or A to gain space in the Gen2 pastures. Once they’re 2, I place all eligible mares into the proper pastures, where they’ll stay until they either age out, or are bumped due to superior genes/papers.

I don’t like swapping my mares in and out of pasture...the pasture bonus is v important to me, especially when it comes to breeding higher and higher paper levels, that it’s just a waste of time for me to take them in and out. If I have “free” space in a pasture due to not enough mares making the cut, I’ll put “cut mares” in the pasture to fill the spots (usually basic untested mares) to produce auction-able foals until I have the right mares to take their spot.

One thing I do find myself doing frequently is only “processing” one pasture at a time when I’ve bred foals. Generally I breed all my pastures simultaneously, but then spend several days going through the foals one pasture at a time, in order to make sure I am not culling foals unnecessarily.

I do wish I’d started auctioning pasture foals off sooner...I’m trying to grow my show herd, which is a slow process, and so only started auctioning off foals recently. The amount of HBs you can make on a few handfuls of foals is really nice to give your stable a pep.

I'm fairly new, and only have one pasture (but the big one, cuz I have the basic upgrade) for all but one of my barns. I also don't have a huge, established show string yet, so I'm trying to make my mares pull double duty!
So this month, I bred all my pastures on the fifth, then pulled all the mares out and showed them twice for that week (since the 5th was a Saturday), and then twice the next day and then threw them back in the pastures. I'll probably breed them all on the ninth (another Saturday) next month, pull them out, show then twice and then twice on Sunday, put them back. That'll put me breeding them 12/14, doing the same thing, then 1/18, 2/22, 3/27 and that month I'll just leave them in so they'll still have full pasture bonus for the next month...
It's kinda complicated and time-consuming, and I imagine I'll stop doing it once I have a solid daily income from dedicated show horses, but for now it works! They always have full bonus when I breed them, but they also slowly get more points. :-B

Awesome info, thanks for the ideas and tips everyone!

Looper, so you are able to move mares between pastures without loosing the bonus? If so that's awesome news!

As long as you don’t remove the horse from the pasture it keeps the pasture bonus. If you scroll down to the bottom of the lists you can select horses from other pastures.