There has been a lot of attention given to the preservation of different breeds of farm animals lately. Some pigs are so rare that there are clubs to help protect and breed them---I just purchased a large black boar. This is true too for cattle and there are many ranchers and farmers who keep rare breeds on small independently run farms and ranches throughout the country, there are also custumers who seek out heritage breed meats as a way to support small farmers and endangered breeds. This trend is really about reclaiming what has been lost with the industrialization of our food production. Commercial production of eggs and milk leave little room for diversity, instead there are just a few breeds that are used and have been breed(usually using science) with extreme production in mind. This is true in the pork industry where pigs have been breed to excel in factory farms; they gain weight rapidly, are extremely high strung and require prestigious amounts of feed.
However with grass-fed farming, it is the older more traditional breeds that excel on a grass-fed diet because they were breed for centuries to turn grass into food. Out on the La Cense Ranch they raise the rugged Black Angus and on my parent’s farm we cross Scottish Highland Cows with Black Angus and Hereford cattle. In Texas, our region this week, they have a native breed of cattle that is excels in its arid environment: the Texas Long Horn. The Texas long horn is prized for its beauty, intelligence and ruggedness it is also native to the US, its ancestors coming from Spain almost 500 years ago. Running wild in Texas’s native grasslands they breed with some northern European breeds becoming extremely well adapted to Texas’s vast rangeland and they excel on grass and can even thrive on weeds, cactus and brush. The Texas long horn fell out of favor because it is an extremely lean breed when tallow was highly prized and in 1927 it was so endangered the breed had to be brought back by a group of dedicated preservationists. Ironically enough, what made the long horn unpopular in the 19th century makes it valuable today. A Texas long horn cow can forage land that other breeds cannot and its meat is low in fat, something that custumer’s prize--- it truly is the ultimate grass-fed cow for the southwest!
