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That old cow out there, she’s 18, and she’s had 17 calves. . .She might just go get buried with that other old cow. I only ever buried one cow, but that cow, she was my father’s best cow. . .I used to let her live around the sheds, and she was one of them wise animals. You know, if she could talk, she could tell you something. And the kindest cow. I’ve got videos of [my daughter] milking her; she was a young kid. . .And I’ve got her daughters in our herd, and I’ve got her last son. . .and we’re using him back through the herd as well.
—Greg, Red Poll cattle farmer
In Greg’s recollections we see three generations of farmers perpetuating a bovine bloodline, whose prolific procreation, in turn, supports the farmers’ livelihood. For millennia, humans and cattle have lived interdependently. In return for shelter, feed and care, cattle have provided people with milk, meat, labor, and hides.
Since the 1940s, the goal of animal husbandry has shifted to increasing performance for economic gain. Cattle have been divided into dairy or beef breeds, and selectively bred for milk volume or rapid growth and muscling, respectively. Production increases have been extraordinary, yet have come at a cost to animal welfare, the environment, and genetic diversity. Recognizing the deep entanglements of humans and livestock, human-environment geographers Jody Emel, Connie L. Johnston, and Elisabeth Stoddard ask whether we can “practice a respectful, more just form of farming” with “more fulfilled, farmed animals that have lengthier and higher quality lives?” To this end, Australian heritage breed cattle farmers offer an alternative to the productivist model, as breeders make holistic selection decisions that reflect interspecies reciprocity developed over generations of cohabitation.
Farming family lineages
Greg comes from a long line of farmers. During World War II, with the men in the family away serving, his mother and grandmother hand-milked 40 Jersey cows, morning and night, in the fertile, volcanic country of western Victoria in Australia’s southeast. After the war, when Greg’s mother met and married his father, his grandmother gave the newlyweds two of her best cows, two buckets, and a separator to get them started off in their own dairy. Greg describes his mother as “a real animal person,” “a cow woman,” who had a keen eye for breeding and taught her children and grandchildren how to live well with cattle.
Greg’s father was also a skilled cattleman, who experimented with several breeds before settling on Red Polls. When he was dying from leukemia, he passed his beloved herd on to his son. Greg describes his early years of farming as follows:
We were in a drought when I started leasing ground, and I just didn’t want to sell this beautiful line of heifers. So the first year of rent was the hardest; I remember selling cull cows to pay the rent. We had a young family, you know, young kids under 10. They were tough times. So we crawled and scraped and baled hay off the side of the bloody road to survive during that dry year. And everyone was buying hay, and hay was sky high, and I just tipped all my cows out on some wheat stubble, and I didn’t buy a bale, and they didn’t let me down, they just powered through.
Domestic extinctions
Red Poll cattle were first imported to Australia by settler colonials in the early 1800s. As a hardy, dual-purpose breed, providing milk with high butterfat and quality beef with good marbling, they soon became popular. Yet along with over 40 additional heritage cattle breeds, Red Poll numbers dropped dramatically with the rise of high-yielding industrial breeds.
Over 10, 000 years of domestication, cattle have adapted to all inhabited continents and are of profound cultural and economic significance to diverse communities. From the 1700s onward, artificial selection consolidated populations into defined breeds. The productivist approach of recent decades grew from the application of quantitative genetics and statistical theory to the principles of heredity. Agribusinesses have invested heavily in livestock breeding programs and marketing campaigns that promote and widely disseminate the genetics of a diminishing number not only of cattle breeds, but also bloodlines.
Affective relationships with animals, built through decades of shared adversity, success, and hard work, lend to relationships of reciprocity.
This is most pronounced in the United States, where the Holstein Association USA calculates that 94 percent of the dairy herd is now constituted by Holsteins. Systematic selection and artificial insemination have allowed for rapid improvement in milk production, yet have substantially decreased the genetic diversity within the breed. In their research into male Holstein lines, Yue Xiang-Peng, Chad Dechow, and Wan-Sheng Liu found that almost all artificial insemination (AI) Holstein bulls worldwide traced their lineage to one of two bulls born in the 1880s. Their lineages extend to two AI bulls born in 1960, from whom 99.84 percent of North American Holstein bulls are today descended. In terms of genetic diversity, these nine million cows are estimated to be equivalent to a herd of fewer than a hundred animals. In addition to the risks posed by such a staggering lack of bloodline diversity, this paradigm has resulted in the extinction of 184 cattle breeds across the globe.
In Australia, countless family-run dairy farms have closed, as the economies of scale required to meet market demands for cheap milk favor large-scale operations. Holsteins supply over 70 percent of Australia’s milk, while beef cattle are dominated by Droughtmasters and Brahmans in the North, and Angus and Herefords in the South. Ten cattle breeds in Australia are now extinct, with another 38 listed as under threat by the Rare Breeds Trust of Australia.
Breeding objectives
As social constructs, breeding objectives—like breeds themselves—will always be dynamic and contested. Yet the productivist paradigm is concerning not only because of the associated loss of diversity, but for its poor animal welfare outcomes. Selection for milk volume has resulted in Holsteins suffering metabolic and structural problems, increased production disease prevalence, and reduced fertility and longevity. High milk outputs require high feed inputs—including consumption of grain that could be eaten by humans—that increase ecological impacts, while a corollary of the global dissemination of lucrative bloodlines has been the spread of genetic defects and disease. Such harms demonstrate that reducing livestock to unidimensional commodities constitutes a breach of what writer Stephen Budiansky terms the “ancient contract” between livestock and people.
While economic gain remains the industry’s guiding principle, there is growing recognition of the detriments of the productivist approach, with its disaggregation of traits into estimated breeding values (EBVs) and selection indices.