The Jockey Club has estimated that there will be 19,925 foals born in the U.S. in 2018. If those numbers hold true, it will mark the first time the U.S. foal crop has dipped below 20,000 since 1965, when there were 18,846 registered foals, reports www.thoroughbreddailynews.com
Mares And Foals (George Stubbs)
The 2018 number represents a 4.7% decline from the estimated foal crop number for 2017. The number of foals born peaked in 1986, when there were 51,296.
Most of the other breeding related figures in the fact book do not go past 2017, which was a milestone year for the California breeding industry. With 2,450 mares bred, it passed Florida as the second biggest breeding state in the U.S. behind Kentucky.
