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In general, when bootstrapping, the plan is to breed low generation low papered mares to a high stallion until their daughters start to age up and replace them in the herd. So, let’s say you start with 60 foundation mares and a Star stud in a pasture—you breed those together for 3 seasons and on the fourth, you replace a portion of the foundation mares with the “gen 2” mares from the cross. The next season you replace more, and again the next season til you have all “gen 2” mares and start to replace them with gen 3s.

The general theory is multifaceted, as this is a way to create a high quality show herd relatively quickly if you keep most of what you breed. It’s also a way to quickly increase mare quality if you have purchased a high Paper stallion that you love, but don’t have anything to breed to him.

Mare Lag is also an issue in the game. It is easy to pick the very highest quality colts out of a crop and only keep them as Breeders, but you have to remember that a high proportion of the fillies from the same crop that passed all testing aren’t actually as good as that colt. Mares generally tend to lag behind stallions in breeding quality for this reason, so once you get up to sort of gen 6 and above, you mares may be running 2 or more generations behind you stallions. Bootstrapping will help increase that mare quality much more quickly than the very long game of breeding evenly, culling harshly, and then intensely monitoring Average Foal PT score to cull out your worst performers at each generation over time. You’ll get the same place with both methods, but the time period for bootstrapping is a fraction of the time it takes breeding evenly. Both absolutely have their place! I will never tell you playing the long game doesn’t pay off! But man is it a long game!