Pineywoods

The line starts with the first cattle landed at Hispaniola in 1493 to feed colonists, and reached the mainland through Spanish Florida in 1565 and 1640. What shaped it after that was the Southeast itself, across Alabama, Mississippi and Georgia, with a light hand of human selection on top.

Improved English and European cattle arrived in the late 1800s and displaced them wherever the newcomers could stand the climate. Crossbreeding took much of the rest. What survived, survived in family herds: the documented strains carry the names of the families that kept them, Holt in Georgia, Barnes in Alabama, and Conway, Bayliss and Carter in Mississippi. The Carter herd began in the 1860s, and the last outside animal to enter it was a bull in 1895.

A breed association was established in 1999.

Small and rugged, with an angular look: cows run 600 to 800 lb and bulls 800 to 1,200. Most are horned, and the horns vary from long and twisted to short and crumpled.

Color is as variable as the horns, solid and spotted both, and the strains have their own looks: Conway cattle run red and white, Holt predominantly black, Griffen typically yellow.

The constitution is the point. The breed is heat tolerant, long-lived, resistant to parasites and disease, and able to stay productive on forage that would not keep another breed going.

Temperament varies a great deal from herd to herd in this breed, and the Conservancy's own listing says so: variable, can be active. Judge the herd, not the breed, and ask to see the seller's cattle worked before you commit.

They were kept for beef, occasionally milked, and worked as oxen in the southeastern timber industry. Today the job is low-input beef on ground and in heat that defeat improved breeds, plus the draft and homestead uses the history points to.

Less than most cattle. They were shaped by heat, humidity, parasites and rough forage, and they hold their productivity in conditions that cost other breeds theirs. What they need from a buyer is mostly not to be managed into a feedlot animal.

The breed is ranked Threatened on The Livestock Conservancy's Conservation Priority List. The family strains are described by the Conservancy as the most important genetic reservoir of the breed, which makes strain identity a conservation matter, not a curiosity: a strain that disappears takes its genetics with it.

Ask which strain an animal comes from and whether the breeder keeps strains pure. With the breed's diversity concentrated in a handful of family lines, that answer matters to what you are buying and to the breed.

Registration runs through the Pineywoods Cattle Registry & Breeders Association; a separate Pineywoods Cattle Association also exists, so confirm which paperwork you are being shown.

The trade is scale and finish. These are small cattle that finish slowly and light next to commercial breeds; the return is in what they cost you, which is very little, rather than in what they weigh.

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