Page 44 - March_2023

SPEEDLINES
now in today’s atmosphere the best mares
a person can accumulate are First Down Dash mares, Mr Jess Perry mares, Tres Seis mares, Corona Cartel mares, mares along that line. Not necessarily by those stallions, although that would be the best, but I would include granddaughters of those stallions.
If you go to the catalogs of the sales today like the Ruidoso Sale and Heritage Place Sales, you will see what I am talking about on that concentration of our bloodlines.” An example he noted was Mr Jess Perry on Corona Cartel and vice versa.
Mac then recalled the story of how Alice K White came to be an important part of their breeding program. “Her dam, Champagne Lane, was an extremely fast mare that made almost $150,000. We ran her in the upper intermountain area and then took her to California where she won La Primero Del Ano Derby, and she was the fastest qualifier for the Southern California Derby. She unfortunately chipped in the finals and didn’t do as good
as we had liked her to do. She has been a
MJ Farms may be a stallion station built on good stallions, but as Mac explained it
is the mare power that he looks for in his breeding program. “It is really hard to prove a young horse whether they have a race record or they don’t have a race record,” he said. “Of course, the stallion gets all the credit for what the offspring do, but my theory has always been the mare gets 80% and the stallion gets 20% of the credit. So, to prove a horse you have to have two things. You’ve got to have a good number of mares and you’ve got to have good mares.”
He went on to explain how he sees it
in today’s situation. “Our gene pool is so concentrated that you just don’t know where that good runner is coming from. They don’t always come from mares that are the big runners. Now you see some of them pop up from the mare that wasn’t a big runner herself, but the gene pool is so concentrated they can come from anywhere.”
He further explained his thoughts on his theory this way, and he shows the role the mare plays in their breeding program. “Alice K White, and unfortunately we lost her last year, but her
and her dam were the
foundation of our
whole program. She
was a tremendous mare
by First Down Dash
and on my estimation,
and I’m not the greatest
expert on breeding,
but I think right
tremendous broodmare. For several years, we had foal shared on some of the more expensive stallions -Mr Jess Perry and First Down Dash- because we couldn’t afford the whole stud fee. It just so happened in 2005 when she was ready to breed, we had enough money and
we acquired a breeding to First Down Dash, so we sent her to California to Vessels Stallion Farm to be bred.
“We sent Champagne Lane out there with a baby on her side in February and she didn’t get in foal until June,” he continued. “Before she settled, they called me and said, ‘Let us try it one more time.’ I said, ‘No, it is too late,’ but they convinced me to try it one more time and Alice K White was born in May. We loved her from the time she was born, but we thought with that late date and that much money into it at that point, we wouldn’t get our money back if we sold her. This is how we were able to get Alice K White.”
He then added this about what may have contributed to the late breeding. “That was the year First Down Dash was hurt and they had to breed with frozen semen for like half the breeding season. She was born
in 2006 and back then the technology wasn’t as good on frozen semen as it is today. We used some common sense and didn’t start her till June of her two-year-old year.”
Alice K White went on to reward them with earnings of $276,837 winning the Golden State Derby-G1 and the La
Champagne Lane, the dam of Alice K White, winning the 1997 Town Policy Handicap.
© Speedhorse Archives
© Los Alamitos
42 SPEEDHORSE March 2023
Alice K White, the foundation mare of the MJ Farms breeding program, winning the Golden State Derby at Los Alamitos.