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If the same breeding program is supposed to serve a too large range of environments, it may become wiser to split the breeding program in two. That decision will depend on the outcome of a number of questions. What is the genetic progress now and how will that improve when the breeding program is split? Very important in relation to that is your competitive position with respect to others that operate in the same market. As a breeding company, you can save money by maintaining a single breeding program, but you can lose much more by losing genetic gain, and thus market share, to your competitor. Obviously this is the case in farm animal breeding, but it also is the case in riding horse breeding! The KWPN, for example, has decided to split its breeding program in two: one for dressage and one for show-jumping. The selection criteria for both specialisations specializations are different. Stallions for the dressage specialisation specialization are no longer tested on their show jumping skills but they should have excellent gates gaites and show real potential in the performance test. Stallions for the show jumping specialisation specialization are not punished for having less superior gatesgaites, but they should show real potential for show jumping. The idea was that this would allow more genetic progress through specialisation. There were costs involved, but the idea was that the benefits would outweigh the costs and market share could be further increased. Because the split of the breeding program into two has been relatively recent, the results have not been evaluated yet. But preliminary results suggest that from genetic progress point of view the split has been a success.

A rule of thumb for running a breeding program is that if the genetic correlation between performance in two environments drops below 0.6, so if different genetics is required to perform well in either environment, it becomes worthwhile to split the breeding program into two: one for each environment. A correlation higher than 0.6 indicates that even though the selection of the parents may be sub-optimal, it still outweighs the costs of running two separate breeding programs. Costs involve not only the financial consequences, but the costs with respect to loss in genetic response to selection if the population is reduced in size, and with respect to maintaining genetic diversity (of the two smaller populations).

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