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PT scores are an indication of how a horse will perform in shows, but it's totally separate from a horse's breeding ability.

Unfortunately for your hb wallet, Breeding Inspection is really the best way to figure out how your horses will breed.

If you poke around, you'll see that lots of people have horses with terrible PT but good breeding ability, and vice versa! So PT testing is a great way to determine if you should keep a snipped horse for showing, but it doesn't tell you anything about whether a horse will produce good foals.

If I'm short on funds, I use Breeding Inspection on horses I am thinking about keeping to breed, to see if they are worth it, and only PT test them if they fail BA or paper poorly, to decide whether to keep them for showing or send them to auction.

All that means -- if you want to improve the quality of your horses, the only guaranteed way to know the quality is by papering them through breeding inspection. You can make progress by breeding evenly, but you may be breeding horses that deserve to be snipped and you'll have no way to know.

What's even more interesting in regards to showing is that since PT indicates how long they will train, not how well, you can actually at times have a higher PT level off in a bad spot and make way less than a lower PT in the end. @HunterUnderSaddleGirl is doing a fascinating study of this right now.

http://hj2.huntandjump.com/forum/discussion/65064/research-experiment

Lol, yes! Nice to have their wise advice in concrete numbers :))

My criteria for keeping show horses is pretty simple: I base it off how much they're making vs how much it costs to show them, once they've leveled off. If they're making more than they cost, they stay! If I start running out of room, I may up the margin of profit, but I'd honestly just rather get another barn than cull what I've got, at least for now. It'll probably be later that I start increasing the margin. :D

That’s a difficult question to answer, because everyone has different standards. When starting from C/yellow, most people require B/red at second. Some require A and blue/red 3rd gen, some are happy with B/red 3rd gen. Some are even happy with 4th gen B/red if they pass SBA and have most or all of the desired genes.

For me personally, this is my requirements

Foundation: C/yellow
Second: B/red
Third: B/red passed SBA and must have a copy of DP
Fourth: A/Blue unless hom DP and any other desired genes, then I will allow red paper mares
Fifth: must be A/Blue

All of my horses must pass SBA, I also comp test colts and only keep STS.

It gets harder when you bring outside bred horses though, because there is no guarantee the horse has passed SBA (some don’t have access, some just don’t use it on certain genes).

Basically I would think to have a quality breeding program you'd like to see improvement in each generation. The actual values would depend on how strict you want to be.

Very achievable without being too strict is;

Gen1/Foundations - C/B and/or Yellow/Red
Gen2 - B/Red, with some A/Blues. Personally I require most of my B's from C sires to still be a higher B. But it costs quite a bit in comparison testing to find those best ones
Gen3 - All A/Blue. If something has special genes, and/or I don't have many blues for that Era that I will often keep a few red mares. All A stallions though. This isn't hard to achieve as long as the gen2 stallions were superior to sire
Gen4 - A/Blue (I'd expect higher A/Blues but can be hard to work out with mares), if you started with some B/Red foundations you might see an occasional Star/Gold at 4th gen too
Gen5 - Very possible to be all Star/Gold, I still keep quite a few blue mares though unless I go on a culling spree!
Gen6 onwards all should be Star/Gold, anything else really is quite poor quality

You can also work it out on AFPT (average foal PT), personally I rarely do as I then have to open up every mare picture to update the AFPT. The paper levels are accurate enough for me. AFPT is useful when I have simply too many mares within a certain generation, they are all the same paper and I want to cull numbers! The actual PT of a horses tells you nothing about their breeding ability, but it does help indicate the breeding ability of their sire/dam

I do like every single sire to be superior to sire, or at least better than my benchmark from previous generation, some I have higher exceptions than just superior to sire, so they meet my requirements for that generation, especially for lower generations.
It's going to be very hard to improve quality without using the Breeding Inspection, and Comparison test. The comparisons tests to get a superior sire are useful too, in that their foals are going to have to be almost as good as them to pass SBA, then helps cull the lower quality foals.

The more strict you are, the less intact foals you'll have of course, especially with the range in each paper level and mares not being as good as stallions. So if you prefer your quality to improve a bit more slowly just adjust the numbers to what suits you better.

Hope that helps!

If you want to improve quality quickly then use SBA as to pass they have to be at least as good as their parents whereas BA they can be a little worse.

If you keep doing what your doing although maybe use a little more SBA to keep costs down you only have to paper those that make it through the restrictions you already have in place then you don't have to test them all.

I'd do the opposite TrueBlue, I'd SBA your Foundations, and gen2/gen3, but after that maybe just BA. You'll get more intacts in the earlier generations because mare and stallion quality are closer, so you can afford to let those worst ones go. You are going to find it hard to improve quality if the majority of your foals are worse than sire/dam, using SBA means at least the foals are almost as good as their sire/dam. If you don't want to improve quality with each generation, then just BA is fine, you'll get more intacts and the quality will float along probably roughly the same level

I love reading everyone's ideas on things like this.
I sba everything and I used to auction anything that didn't pass - made some money on the foals because I always breed in pastures and only papered those that pass sba. Once I got money, I bought more barns (I was always broke for the first 12 months of playing) and gradually kept more and more of those altered show ponies.
Now, as long as I don't do too much GMTing, I have enough money every season to do all my breeding and buy 2 or 3 more 210 barns. :)

Well, I'm about three months shy of my one-year hjaversary and so my breeding program is not that far along but this is what I've been doing with my stock. Minus my bootstrap herd because obviously, they have different rules.

Everything is sent through SBA with the very rare exception of really special horses (those that I only have a single straw for/get one breeding or have really fancy genes) those are sometimes sent through BA instead. My foundation horses are a mix of Yellow/Red mares and C/B stallions. I usually keep to breeding Yellow/C and Red/B but, if they have full pasture bonus, I'll sometimes breed yellow studs to red mares and I've had a decent number of intact foals out of those crossings.

Second Gen: Pass SBA, Red/B or Blue/A papered. Studs must be STS and have the genes I want for that line.

Third Gen: Pass SBA, Mares should be Blue but I'll keep Red too since I don't have a ton of G3 yet. Studs need to be STS and paper B/A or better.

Fourth Gen: (I've just barely started here) I still SBA everything, Mares need to be Blue/Gold. Studs need to be STS and A/Star.

Fifth and beyond?: Not here yet but I'd assume I'll keep on my same track of STB and aiming for all Gold mares but assuming some Blue will stay as well. Hopefully studs will Star and STS.

This is just basic culling for me as far as keeping horses, assuming they pass all this I then look at color/genes, bone weight, and other factors as to if they stay in my breeding program, get snipped for the show string, or sent off to auction/sold. As I get more mares into each of my lines I get pickier and pickier with what they need to have to stick around otherwise I get overwhelmed and get far too many foals each year and not enough space to keep them all.

@RubyJoFarm Any chance I could get an egg from that snf/kp/dp mare in question this year or next?

Awesome!