Breeding can be an emotional roller coaster for many people. The highest of the highs and the lowest of the lows. It can also be expensive and daunting with sometimes not much information and support for the breeders at grassroots. In the end, there is nothing more exhilarating than watching your healthy foal get to his/her feet/hooves and take its first steps. All the worry and $$$ melt away and it was all so worth it. Fast forward to the foal under saddle winning its first-class and the feeling is unreal!

There is very little in the way of breeder support in NZ so our mission is to provide a place for the much-needed support to grow…

There are many aspects to breeding from researching bloodline, understanding stallion contracts, Veterinary costs, obtaining/choosing a mare, judging form and conformation, registration and stud books, DNA testing are just some of the many points to consider when getting into breeding.

It’s fair to say it is not the best idea to get advice about which stallion to use for your mare from a stallion owner…clearly that information will not be an unbiased account of the best possible match for your mare. That said no one knows a stallion better than the Stallion owners his/herself. They will have the best idea of their stallions traits and capabilities and mares they suit the best. So our advice is to get as much advice from as many stallion owners as you can. You will then have a list of the best matches for your mare from all the possibilities.

Stallion contracts are becoming more user friendly. At CryNZ we are interested in working only with stallion owners who have a commitment to our breeders getting a positive result. Not all stallion owners are alike but we believe gone are the days when you paid a several thousand dollar service fee and then played Russian roulette with the straws, often ending up with an enormous vet bill and no pregnancy or foal.

Understanding your stallion contract can be a mind field. Most stallion owners just want to make sure the semen they are selling will produce a pregnancy and will not fall into the hands of an operator with questionable intentions who is trying to abscond with more than one pregnancy after only paying one service fee.

Take for instance ICSI sounds great in theory but essentially it can turn one straw into potentially hundreds of pregnancies. In Europe, there are facilities with specialists Veterinarians performing ICSI on a daily basis.

A stallion owner will advertise a straw from a stallion they have. So you can buy one part of one straw and you are given a date that the ICSI lab is booked for the straw to be thawed and used on the many number of mares booked for the stallion that day. Breeders can book their mare in on that day, then the mare has her eggs flushed and sent to the ISCI lab.

Of course, ICSI is not commonplace here in NZ and is exorbitantly expensive and really only is something to consider if you have a world-class mare whom you wanted to breed to a stallion that was either deceased or has low or no fertility.

Basically any of our stallion owners will work a contract to suit your breeding needs, currently there are some choices.
There is a contract to purchase the straws for a fixed fee. This will be just a simple stock-standard sale of purchase you own the straws and may use them as you wish. These straws can be used for ICSI, you can split the straws up and use them in any dose rate you choose and you can also use them for embryo transfer you pay no more if you manage to get more than one foal but you also have no returns if you do not get any pregnancies.

The most common contract is LFG which stands for Live Foal Guarantee. These means you can return your mare for more semen if the first or second insemination attempt does not result in a pregnancy or if the mare absorbs the pregnancy or the foal does not survive. There may be a condition in this contract which involves your Veterinarian confirming this result.

This season we are delighted to be able to offer this incredible deal from The Stallion Company “PAY AT FOALING” which means the service fee is deferred until the foal is born and healthy.

We also welcome the new stallions from the Holsteiner Verband along with the new pricing system and the possibility for registering your foal directly to the Holsteiner global studbook in Germany. With these stallions, you pay a booking fee which starts at 350 Euro and then pay nothing more until you have a pregnancy. These contracts require an approved Veterinarian to perform the inseminations and report on the result. These processes are in place so there is transparency for all involved and will keep costs for our breeders to a minimum and more consistency of positive results.

These are changing times and we look forward to this breathing life back into our sporthorse industry.