From Stud Books To Smartphones: How Horse Breeding Has Changed In 20 Years
The horse breeding industry has changed significantly in the last 20 years. Artificial insemination (AI), ultrasounding mares, shipping semen and embryo transfer were all established technologies by the early 2000s, but they were not the norm.
Live cover (LC) was considered the normal way to breed a mare to a stallion by most breeders. The majority of mare owners would choose a local stallion standing at a local stud and have the mare go and stay there a couple of weeks to be bred.
AI now being the norm for many breeders, and LC being used less (outside of the thoroughbred industry, where it is still the only recognised way to breed a mare), is a large and clear change. The now industry norm of shipping semen and our reliance on freight companies such as FedEx in order to do that, is another obvious change. Other ways that the industry has changed are less apparent: the availability of genetic information; the way stallions are marketed; the speed at which information moves between breeders and veterinarians; and the sheer amount of information that a modern breeding program can generate.
These changes have enveloped us into them so incrementally over the years that our use of them feels normal. But nonetheless, breeders today have access to, and generate, a huge amount of data.
Shipped semen means more choice
The development and commercial adoption of assisted reproductive technologies in horse breeding is substantial. Artificial insemination was already widely used in many breeds 20 years ago, and cooled and frozen transported semen were becoming an increasingly important part of breeding programs. But your stud farm down the road would have taken visiting mares as the bread and butter or their business.
AI would have been available from either very forward thinking stud managers, or the big-name stallions for which there was a large demand. Cooled fresh shipped semen would not have been available as widely as it is today.
These days, a stallion does not necessarily need to be anywhere near the mare for a breeding to take place. Transported semen has effectively expanded the geographical reach of stallions. On a practical level, this has changed the question that a mare owner would need to ask themself from "Which stallions are available near me?" to "Which stallion is the best match for my mare?"
Distance is still a consideration, of course. Shipping costs, collection schedules, semen quality and the ability of a mare to conceive using transported semen all matter. But geography is no longer the limitation it once was.
There is good and bad to this. The good is more choice, more options, better breeding matches, more marketable foals. The bad: more reliance on Fedex, more money spent per breeding cycle, and the “popular sire” syndrome. (This is when a champion or heavily promoted stallion is bred to an excessive number of mares, disproportionately dominating a breed's gene pool).
Embryo Transfer and The Working Mom
Before Embryo Transfer (ET) was an established breeding option, a mare could either be bred or be ridden. This was a dilemma for breeders who wanted their mares to have a ridden career but also didn’t want to wait for too long to breed. An older maiden mare can have more trouble conceiving than a younger maiden, so waiting too long to breed can reduce a mare’s ability to be bred at all. This is the working mom issue, in that with horses, a mare couldn’t work on her career while having babies. It was one or the other.
ET has changed that. A mare can be bred, and the embryo can then be flushed, recovered and transferred into a recipient mare. The donor mare does not have to carry the pregnancy herself, and this means she can continue her sport horse career or riding career.
ET has been a game changer for high-performance mares. The fact that a mare can continue a sporting or competition career while producing offspring, opens a door of possibility to breeders that was once firmly shut. Not to mention that a mare who cannot safely carry a pregnancy herself may still be able to contribute genetically to a breeding program.
Another consideration of embryo transfer, that has undeniably changed the breeding pool and a mare’s offspring potential is that more than one foal to be produced from a mare in a year. The practical outcome depends on ovulation, embryo recovery and transfer success as well as the rules of the relevant breed registry, but nonetheless this is a changed reality for mares.
We have gone from having a natural biological constraint that allowed one mare to produce just one foal a year, to not having that constraint anymore.
If that were not radical enough, it gets better! We now have the ability to cool, freeze and transport embryos. Rather than the donor and recipient mares always needing to be managed at the same facility, embryos can be transported to specialist facilities containing recipient mares. This has helped make embryo transfer considerably more flexible. Not got a recip mare ready in time? No problem, you can vitrify the embryo and quite literally save it for another day and another mare.
ICSI has changed the conversation around fertility
Perhaps one of the most remarkable developments of the last 20 years has been the emergence of commercial equine intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI). In a nutshell, it used to be a fact that a mare or stallion with sub-fertility would not make a good breeding horse. With ICSI, that rule has changed.
In conventional breeding, millions of sperm are used to fertilise an egg. ICSI takes a very different approach: a single sperm is injected directly into an oocyte. The technology was being developed earlier, but the last two decades have seen it progress from an experimental technique into a commercial reproductive technology.
For breeders, this can be particularly significant when sperm availability is limited, or sperm quality is poor. Now, a stallion that has died, become infertile, or has only a limited supply of frozen semen may still be able to produce offspring through an ICSI program. Modern ICSI programs can work with very small quantities of sperm compared with conventional insemination. Likewise a stallion with very low numbers of motile sperm that would usually not be a good candidate for shipped semen can have one single motile sperm extracted from a collection and used.
The downside? The risk of potentially breeding poor fertility into our herds. While it may be wonderful that a low motility stallion can still produce offspring with the assistance of a skilled theriogenologist and ICSI, it is also understood that good fertility is a heritable trait. Are we in danger of breeding ourselves into a fertility deficit when we select for stallions with lower motility?
Twenty years ago, a limited supply of semen could place a very hard ceiling on a stallion's reproductive future. Even if he had been successfully frozen, one frozen dose was one frozen dose.
Today, reproductive laboratories can sometimes make use of semen quantities that would not have been sufficient for conventional breeding. One frozen dose is not just one frozen dose anymore, it is potentially … thousands.
That doesn't mean these technologies are appropriate or economically sensible for every breeding program… yet. They are expensive and success depends on many biological and technical factors. But remember that not so long ago, shipped semen and ET were outside the reach of most breeders. We imagine that one day not so far away, with the advancements in technology and techniques, ICSI will be something that any breeder can utilize.
Genetic information has become much more accessible
The first draft of the horse genome was released in 2007, following an international effort to sequence the approximately 2.7 billion DNA base pairs in the horse genome. Since then, equine genetic research has expanded considerably.
Genetic testing is now available for a range of inherited diseases and other traits, and genetic information can be used to inform breeding and management decisions.
This has given breeders information that simply wasn't available to them 20 years ago. Instead of relying entirely on pedigree, phenotype, and a good eye, breeders can increasingly ask questions about what an individual horse carries genetically.
Disease testing can help breeders identify carriers and make more informed pairing decisions, potentially reducing the risk of producing affected offspring. We see this a lot in breeds with larger numbers such as AQHA where disease panel testing is absolutely the norm and expected.
Data allows breeders to make more informed decisions and hopefully breed
away from heritable diseases in the same way breeders have always tried to breed away from conformation issues. One would hope that relying on data doesn’t devalue the “good eye” that an experienced horseman has for a well put together horse, but rather enhances it by backing it with science.
Mare management has become more precise
Ultrasound itself is not new — ultrasonography revolutionised equine reproductive management from the late 1970s and early 1980s — but its role in everyday breeding management has become increasingly sophisticated.
Today, reproductive veterinarians and skilled mare owners can closely monitor follicular development, uterine edema and tone, and use that information to determine when a mare should be inseminated. Ovulation can also be induced when appropriate, allowing breeding managers to coordinate insemination with semen collection and transport. A mare owner might be working with a stallion hundreds or thousands of miles away. The mare's reproductive status needs to be communicated to the stallion station, a collection needs to be scheduled, semen needs to be collected and processed, and the shipment needs to arrive at the appropriate time. The logistics are quite impressive!
Twenty years ago the norm was to trailer your mare to the stud, drop her off, and pick her up after she comes out of heat. Pretty uncomplicated and only the mare owner and the stud manager need to coordinate that. The modern breeding program involves not just good communication, but coordination. While more parties have to work together, the whole process has evolved to be a lot more precise and therefore efficient than it used to be.
A stallion used to breed a mare for a week, now a repro vet can inseminate her just once. The technology available today makes it possible to bring much of this information together.
That is one of the reasons we developed StallionApp. As breeding programs have become more sophisticated, we felt there was a need for breeders to be able to keep their mare, stallion and breeding records together rather than having important information scattered across different systems.
What might the next 20 years look like?
It is difficult to predict exactly where equine breeding will be in another 20 years, but the direction of travel is fairly clear if the last 20 years are anything to go by. Reproductive technologies will continue to develop. Genetic testing will become more sophisticated. Breeding programs will generate increasingly large amounts of data. Software will make it easier to analyse that information and identify patterns that are difficult for an individual breeder to see.
The question is not whether technology will continue to change horse breeding. The question is how breeders will use it.
It may be that horse breeding has gradually evolved from a process based primarily on experience, pedigree and proximity into one increasingly influenced by reproductive science, genetics, global access and information. And that leaves today's breeders with something their predecessors did not have to the same extent: More choices. More information. More possibilities.
The thought, commitment, and dedication of professional horse breeders has always been there. The experience and knowledge base it takes to be a good horse breeder is undeniable, and that is something that even with all the technology in the world, will remain.
StallionApp
Horse breeding Management Software
StallionApp is a comprehensive horse breeding management platform designed specifically for the equine breeding industry. It provides breeders, stallion owners, mare owners, veterinarians, breeding managers, and stallion stations with a single place to organise every aspect of a breeding program.
Whether you manage one mare or an entire stallion station, StallionApp helps simplify record keeping, improve communication, and reduce the administrative workload associated with breeding horses.
This article is from the September 2026 issue of Equine Business Magazine
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