Irish Black

Maurice Boney's breeding program dates to the late 1960s and 1970s. Boney bred five half-sister Angus females of the Revolution line to three beef Friesian sires imported from Ireland, bred the daughters back within the group, and closed the herd in 1971; everything since has been bred inside it. In 1997 he obtained a United States patent that the program presents as establishing Irish Black as a separate breed, and the name was trademarked in the 1990s.

An Irish Black Cattle Association was organized in 2013 to record pedigrees for the Irish Black and its red counterpart, the Irish Red.

The traits the Irish Black program selects for, by its own account, are feed efficiency, early maturity, carcass quality, calving ease, udder quality and a shorter gestation. Ultrasound carcass testing in the late 1990s is cited by the program as confirmation. Treat all of these as the program's claims: the closed structure means there is little outside data to check them against.

The Irish Black Cattle Association lists a mild temperament among the traits the line is selected to keep, according to Tri-State Livestock News's history of the breed, and one breeder, CFF Irish Blacks, describes cattle that are easy to handle and sort. That is the program's own account. By that breeder's account the line has too few cattle for an EPD database, so there are no EPDs to check it against. Judge the herd in front of you.

Cornell's general guidance on beef cattle safety holds here too: a cow with a newborn calf can be very aggressive, so avoid walking between her and the calf, and no bull can be trusted.

The claims made for the line are moderate mature size with high growth rate, calving ease, and carcass consistency, and the program markets bulls rather than a general-purpose registry.

The association's president told DTN in 2019 that the cattle slick off in summer and grow a hairy winter coat, and that there are herds from the Northern Plains to Mississippi; the president's own herd runs strictly on forage. The association gives calf birth weights of 60 to 85 lb.

The breeding structure is the thing to understand. The line was built by breeding females back to their full brothers and fathers and has been closed since 1971, so ask how an animal is related to the rest of your herd before you use it. The association's own advice is to verify that cattle sold as Irish Black are what the seller says before you buy.

Irish Black is a closed, single-source line, and that is the thing to understand before you buy. It means the selection decisions were made by one program rather than by an open registry with published across-herd comparisons.

The trade is verification. Ask what performance data exists, who collected it, and whether it can be compared with EPDs from a national cattle evaluation, because in most cases it cannot be compared directly.

Recent sale prices on HoofnHorn, where there are any, are further down this page.