"Breeding racehorses is an inexact science; there are certain principles which are a help to success, but they neither ensure it nor provide a guarantee against failure.”

Thus wrote John Hislop in his well-respected 1976 book Breeding For Racing.

No matter what anyone tells you, breeding a racehorse to make money is far from easy. Taking your mare to stud and getting her in foal is perhaps the simplest part – and that’s not so simple either.

Your mare needs to be in season good and early in the year – Valentine’s Day is considered by many to be the first day of the season in Europe.

To be registered as a thoroughbred, a foal must be the product of a natural mating of a stallion and a mare called a ‘live cover’. You have to choose a stallion, bring the mare to a stud and hope that the stallion covering works and your mare becomes pregnant.

Though artificial insemination (AI) and embryo transfer are possible and are common in other horse breeds such as the Irish Sport Horse, it is banned with thoroughbreds.

The population of the breed is thereby controlled, ensuring a high monetary value for the horses in the process.

Your mare will carry her foal for 11 months and because each foal is assigned an official birth date of January 1 (because of the age groups that define thoroughbred races), it is important that mares foal as early as possible in the calendar year.

This ensures maximum development time for the foal to get big and strong before training and racing.

How much does it cost to breed a racehorse?

You first need to decide if you are breeding for the sales as a commercial breeder, or breeding to produce a racehorse who you plan to run. Whichever you want to breed for, the highest standards of top-racing performance, soundness, temperament, constitution, conformation and courage must be the breeder’s aim.

Let’s propose the imaginary scenario that we are going to breed a mare for flat racing. We buy our mare during the winter breeding stock sales – let’s call her ‘Irish Country Lass’.

If you don’t have a farm, you will have to board Irish Country Lass. The cost of boarding in Ireland varies wildly, but it should loosely be around €25 a day, so we will assume a weekly cost of €175 (excluding VAT).

Without any major accidents, Irish Country Lass might have further bills of €500 or so per year, which will include farriery, dentistry and vaccinations.

She will be covered and let’s say you pick one of the younger, more commercial (less expensive) stallions who might be popular in the sales.

Covering and transport could cost around €8,000. By the end of the year, including a few weeks of boarding, your outlay is going to be something in the order of €17,600.

Foaling

Let’s say all goes well and Irish Country Lass gives you your first foal, a fine colt. This means costs go up again. You must pay those delivering your newborn at stud and also pay the compulsory registration fees to Weatherbys’ General Studbook.

Established in 1791, Weatherbys is the register of the worldwide thoroughbred breed. Horses have raced for hundreds of years, but it was not until the second half of the 18th century that the sport began to be properly organised and regulated.

Growing up

For the first six months when the mare has a foal at foot, the cost could be an extra €5 a day on top of the €25 and once the foal has been weaned, it becomes a separate entity, perhaps costing €15 a day. The rough calculations come out at €13,650.

Until summer, the dam and foal have been living at the stud with the same over­heads, but ahead of a possible sale in the autumn, the yearling must be prepared. This means it must be taught to lead, to be fit for all the walking it will need to do at the sales.

This will cost a little more again – perhaps €35 a day for eight weeks. There will be another few hundred to get it into a sale and to lodge it there. All in all, projected costs are close to €18,610.

These calculations are generalised, but before the yearling goes under the hammer, you might have spent approaching €49,860 across three years to get it there.

Respectable auction

Irish Country Lass should have enough pedigree and form to have a chance of producing offspring accepted for a respectable auction such as Goffs or Tattersalls and she may have cost you in the region of €25,000. The figures do not include the fact that in those three years, most breeders would have had Irish Country Lass covered again a couple of times and you could have another foal on the ground.

So in truth, it’s not inconceivable that you might need to find around €80,000 just to get started at a middling sort of level breeding a racehorse.

The hope is that you will make your money back over time by subsequent sales and subsequent foals, and maybe you will make your fortune in the sales’ ring – it does happen! But the fashion and luck of the sales ring is another story, for another time.