What are mare compatibility notes in HorseBook?

A per-mare assessment kept on each stallion's record: a 1–5 rating, the breeding history between that mare and your stallion, temperament notes, genetic notes, reproductive notes, and an overall call — recommended, neutral, or not recommended. It's the stallion owner's working knowledge of which crosses suit their horse, written down where the rest of the stallion book lives.

Does the mare have to be in my HorseBook account?

No. Most compatibility questions are about outside mares — someone else's mare coming to your stallion. You can log an assessment against one of your own mares or just type in an outside mare's name. Either way the card stays on the stallion, so it's there the next time her owner calls.

Mare Compatibility Notes: The Part of the Stallion Book That Lives in Your Head

By Brian Bickell, who builds HorseBook from a ranch in Oklahoma and stands his own studs — so the bookkeeping this fixes is bookkeeping I do myself.

Somebody calls about breeding their mare to your stallion. Somewhere in your head is everything you actually know about that pairing: you bred a mare built like her two seasons ago and liked the foal. Or the cross threw more temperament than anybody ordered. Or her bloodlines double up on something you'd rather not double up on.

That knowledge is the most valuable thing in a breeding program, and for most stallion owners it lives in the worst filing system there is — memory, old text threads, and a barn conversation from two years back.

Mare compatibility notes are that list, written down.

A card per mare, kept on the stallion

On a stallion's breeding page, you keep an assessment for each mare you've formed an opinion about. One card holds:

A 1–5 rating — your overall read on the cross.
Breeding history — what's actually happened between this mare and this stallion: seasons bred, how it went, what hit the ground.
Temperament notes — what she's like to handle, and what the cross tends to produce.
Genetic notes — whatever testing and bloodline considerations matter in your program.
Reproductive notes — how she's cycled and settled, anything her owner's vet passed along.
The call — recommended, neutral, or not recommended.

It's your own book, in your own words, attached to the horse it's about.

Most of these mares aren't yours — that's fine

The mare in question is usually somebody else's. You don't need her in your account to keep notes on her: pick one of your own mares, or just type an outside mare's name. The card lives on the stallion either way.

So when her owner calls back next February, you're not reconstructing the conversation — you open the stallion's page and your own assessment is sitting there, dated, in your words.

Where it fits in the season

The compatibility list works alongside the rest of the stallion book — the bookings, the collections and shipments, the season summary. The notes inform the booking decision; the booking, once you make it, gets tracked like any other. Come next season, the outcome of that cross is one more line in the mare's card.

Part of the Breeder plan

Mare compatibility notes are part of the full stallion book on the Breeder plan — $39.99/mo or $399.99/yr, alongside bookings, semen collections and shipments, freezing logs, the season summary, breeding fee schedules with shareable invoices, and 1,000 AI document scans a month. Mare-side breeding records — cycles, covers, pregnancy checks, foaling, progeny — stay on every plan.

If you stand a stallion and the institutional knowledge of your program currently lives in your head, the 14-day free trial includes the whole stallion book — no card required.