Return of the native: how cattle breeds from the past may hold the key to the future

Ruth Dalton, Independent Farming Advisor

The UK is a nation of livestock breeders – we have more breeds than any other country in the world. However, over the last 100 years, the fortunes of our native breeds have fluctuated in response to government policy, changing markets for livestock products, and farming fashions. Today, 20 of the 26 native UK beef breeds are classed as “at risk” by Defra. In this paper, I outline how, and why, some British breeds have seen a dramatic revival over the last few decades and describe how small populations of pedigree breeds can recover using the right tools.

There are now over 160 native livestock breeds in the UK, down from more than 180 native breeds in the early 1900s, but the concept of a “breed” was only really developed with the work of Robert Bakewell in the 1760s. When he developed the English Longhorn, Bakewell was the first person to focus effort on selectively breeding for meat – before then, cattle of distinct regional types were kept predominantly for milk, or draught purposes, and eaten only when the animal was of no further use. With the growing population in the 18th century, and a growing demand for meat in people’s diets, Bakewell saw the opportunities in breeding selectively for beef production, mating closely related animals together to fix the characteristics he wanted. Breeds, as we think of them today, were therefore created by selective inbreeding.

Before Bakewell got to work, the huge climatic and geological variation within the British Isles had already produced a great range of regional types of cattle – small, hardy double-coated animals to withstand the wet and windy conditions of the north west, fine-coated red cattle to tolerate the hot summers of the south, and large, rangy beasts in the east of Britain to provide draught power and cope with the bitterly cold winters. Bakewell’s principles of improvement by selective breeding led to the defining of distinct local breeds with shared characteristics, and breed societies sprung up to record and support them.

So, could we just do as Bakewell did, and recreate breeds at will, meaning that their preservation is unnecessary? Although a handful of modern composite breeds, such as the Luing and the Stabiliser, have been developed from existing breeds, and therefore could arguably be recreated relatively easily, many of our native breeds derive from long-extinct ancestors with regional specialities and unique genetic characteristics. The genetics they hold therefore represent a diverse and resilient range of traits which may prove essential to deal with future environmental or disease challenges.

Crucially, most of these breeds were developed before the advent of artificial fertilizers, chemical wormers and readily accessible veterinary skills. The animals therefore needed to thrive on a predominantly forage-based diet, be naturally resistant to parasites, and be fertile, easy-calving and docile. Dual-purpose breeds were popular, providing a decent beef calf and plentiful milk with good constituents, since most milk was transported in the form of butter and cheese, not as liquid milk.

But by the 1950s, government policy and the availability of cheap feed and fertilizer was incentivising production at all costs – to remain profitable, farmers were forced to move away from mixed farming. They were encouraged to switch to continental beef breeds that finished quickly on grain-based feed and high-yielding dairy cows that maximised volume over longevity and milk constituents. These breeds replaced native breeds or were crossed with them – and hybrid vigour and improved yields lead to the slower-growing breeds falling out of favour. Some, like the Longhorn, were reduced to double figures after the war, with only around 50 registered animals in existence.

Fast forward 70 years, and we are farming in an era of high input costs and reduced support payments, where many beef and sheep farms operate at a loss. Farmers are once again looking for breeds which will thrive in a low-input system, that will finish on grass, and that will make use of the huge tracts of land that are unsuitable for growing other foodstuffs owing to rainfall, soil type or topography.

Appropriate land use is crucial to sustaining food security in the UK. Research by the Sustainable Food Trust (“Feeding Britain from the Ground Up”, The Sustainable Food Trust, 2022, https://sustainablefoodtrust.org/our-work/feeding-britain/) modelled the availability of different foodstuffs from UK production alone, showing that by growing the right things in the right places, the UK could feed itself without imports. This would require some significant dietary shifts – pork and chicken, reliant on grain and protein-based feeds that are edible by humans, would reduce enormously, and beef and lamb, consuming non human-edible grass and forage, would become the primary meat source.

Beef calves from dairy cows, with all the efficiency that comes from the cow producing milk for human consumption as well as producing a calf, are already becoming more important, meaning that a more moderate dairy cow with dual-purpose traits can be an advantage. On marginal land where dairying is more challenging, hardy native hill breeds of cattle and sheep are the best option for converting rough vegetation into nutritional food for people.

We are already seeing this playing out in increasing demand for native breeds, with farmers taking advantage of generous incentive payments in the new Environmental Land Management (ELM) schemes to support the rarer breeds. The Longhorn, reduced to 50 animals in the 1950s, is now estimated to boast over 4,000 breeding females, and its historical successor the Shorthorn has increased from fewer than 600 breeding females in 2002, to over 13,000 today – making it one of a handful of native breeds not considered by Defra to be rare. Both breeds have demonstrated key commercial qualities and been supported to market their products widely and effectively by large retailers.

Selective breeding for fertile, low-maintenance cows, with good conformation and a docile temperament is key, but this must be accompanied by great advertising. Without telling the story of a breed, backed up with data and figures to show profitability, they will remain a novelty to many. The challenge for many native breed societies is to support their members to tell their stories, shout about their successes, cull hard, and share the impact on their bottom line.

Many of our dual-purpose breeds, even selectively bred towards their beef traits, will retain a level of milkiness and easy-calving that makes them ideal for modern systems. These cows, overlooked in the modern specialisation to beef or milk, produce calves that grow quickly into beef animals with desirable conformation. They also tend to show a ready marbling from forage that is the envy of most beef breeds, making them ideal for specialist markets.

The diversity of our native breeds may be seen as a disadvantage to some, but with diversity comes opportunity and resilience. Several native breeds are naturally polled, a dominant trait that will be passed on to first-cross offspring. Many are smaller than continental breeds, but bigger is definitely not always better: nowadays a moderate carcass size isn’t just desirable on the hook – an increasing interest in outwintering, often utilising bale-grazing and deferred grazing, means that a medium-sized breed, less likely to poach the ground, is the perfect solution to reduce wintering costs and address the challenges of more extreme weather conditions.

In the right system, all native breeds can be profitable, sustainable and pleasurable to keep – bred to thrive without inputs, their future lies in their diverse genetics, and in the hands of those who choose to champion them.

Back from the brink: Vaynol cattle

Very few breeds are in as perilous a state as the Longhorn once was, but in 2010 our rarest native breed, the Vaynol, was reduced to only a handful of breeding cows in a single location. There are now 6 herds, and over 30 breeding females, thanks to a breeder-led initiative.

The conservation effort has comprised:

• Conservation breeding, using semen collected in the 1990s to breed a range of bulls that were relatively unrelated to the modern population.
• Use of the “SPARKS” mating tool (Dell et al, 2021): originally developed for the critically endangered Cleveland Bay horse, and now increasingly utilised by livestock breeds with small populations, SPARKS identifies the animals with the rarest genes in the living population, allowing them to be selectively bred with unrelated animals which have a similar level of genetic rarity. This increases the proportion of the rarest genes circulating in the breed, conserving vital genetic diversity and reducing inbreeding depression.
• A small and carefully controlled grading programme, now closed, which used White Parks, a related breed already present in the pedigrees of all living Vaynols, crossed back to Vaynol bulls.
• Increased numbers of herds, geographically dispersed, to safeguard against disease outbreak.

The results of this breeder-led initiative have been a 75% increase in estimated breeding females in the last 5 years – from 20 in 2020 to 35 in 2024 – the largest percentage increase of any UK cattle breed.

Reference

Dell, A., Curry, M., Hunter, E., Dalton, R., Yarnell, K., Starbuck, G. & Wilson, P.B. (2021). 16 Years of breed management brings substantial improvement in population genetics of the endangered Cleveland Bay Horse. Ecology and Evolution, 11, 14555-14572. https://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.8118