Progeny is the collective term for the offspring of a horse. A sire or dam produces progeny over successive breeding seasons, and evaluating that progeny — their conformation, soundness, gaits, and competition results — is the primary method of assessing a horse’s genetic value as a breeding animal.
In breed registries and auction catalogs, progeny records list a stallion’s foal crops alongside the performance of notable individual offspring. A stallion producing many high-performing progeny commands higher breeding fees; a mare with a strong progeny record is valued as a broodmare. The term applies to immediate offspring only — the offspring of progeny are grandprogeny or, more commonly, simply described by generation (F1, F2) in breed improvement programs.
Progeny testing — measuring the traits of offspring to infer a parent’s breeding value — is more reliable than evaluating the parent animal alone, because phenotypic performance in a single horse may reflect environment or training rather than heritable genetics. Breed improvement through selection depends on accurate progeny records across a large enough sample from a given founding ancestor.
Further Reading: Wikipedia’s article on progeny testing explains how measuring offspring traits produces a more reliable estimate of a parent’s breeding value than evaluating the parent alone — the core methodology behind stallion and broodmare performance records. The Wikipedia entry on selective breeding provides the broader population-genetics framework in which progeny evaluation is applied.