Sires, Minnesota Sale and Yearlings

With the annual MTA sale catalog now available online, a few folks have sent in questions related to the sale, our yearlings, sires in general and Stormy Business specifically. Here are the answers.

I firmly believe the MTA sale, which will be held on Monday August 22nd at Canterbury Park, will be successful. It represents the very best opportunity buyers have for comparing Minnesota bred yearlings. There are many outstanding pedigrees represented in the catalog. I plan to secure my bidding number and bid, as I have done every year for over a decade.

With this said, I have both bought and sold at the Minnesota auctions over the years. This year, we decided not to consign our bred yearlings to the sale. I am currently planning on keeping and racing our yearlings, although they are available for sale privately. Our yearlings are correctly conformed for racing, of expected yearling size, and in perfect physical condition from both an air passage and bone structure standpoint. They can be inspected up at the Osborne Farm in Cambridge Minnesota.

After reviewing the catalog for this year’s Minnesota Yearling auction, there are 48 sires that have produced the 66 yearlings being offered up for sale. Of the 48 sires listed, 12 sires only have yearlings or 2 years old running in 2016. As a result, these young sires have no foal produce data listed for them. The remaining 36 sires are mature enough to have breeding data listed. The average for the Thoroughbred breed is 69.9% starters per foal and our stallion Stormy Business has averaged 71.4% of his foals starting. If you want to be able to secure a horse that will actually make it through training and start a race on a race track, this is an important statistic because 3 out of 10 foals never even run a race!

Another question related to the likelihood of getting a foal that will win. The average for the Thoroughbred breed is 49.9% winners per foal and our stallion Stormy Business is slightly below that average with 45.7% winners per foal. So if you want a winner and understand that only about 5 out of every 10 foals will ever win a race, this is an important statistic to understand!

Of the 48 sires that have yearlings listed in the upcoming 2016 yearling sale, our stallion Stormy Business ranks 9th in overall percentage of winners produced per foal and 9th in overall percentage of starters per foal! The attached listing ranks the Top 15 sires listed in the catalog by winners per foal, based upon the actual catalog data. I think buyers may be surprised at just how well many of our local standing sires rank in this listing.