the allegheny front

Earth's Bounty: Rare Breeds on Farms

Jennifer Szweda Jordan

Air date: 07/25/2007

NAT. SOUND: Hitting lock and sliding open barn door

JORDAN: David Smith slides open a barn door to check on a red-brown pig -- a Tamworth swine.

SMITH: Maggie, you up for company?

JORDAN: Maggie’s believed to be one of fewer than five-thousand Tamworths in the world.
(Nat. Sound: Pig snorting)
Compare that to popular Yorkshires, which experts say number more than A MILLION in the U-S alone. Because of the Tamworth’s low numbers, the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy puts the breed in the class of a threatened animal.

SMITH: … We have friends in Indiana, and we went to pick her up. I don’t think there’s anybody else in Pennsylvania who raises these. There’s a woman in Delhi, New York’ There are folks like us around, you have to look hard to find us.

JORDAN: Traveling long distances to either buy animals or breed them is typical for people like the Smiths trying to raise rare farm animals. They’re one of an estimated 67-hundred breeders in the country. The hobby varies in expense. The cost of a female Gulf Coast sheep is considered affordable at 150 dollars. Dexter cattle, in recovering status, are at the high end with costs up to 25-hundred dollars.

Some breeds became scarce because agricultural practices have increasingly favored certain animals. These trends have reduced the population of all kinds of farm animals, including goats, horses and rabbits.

SCHRIDER (PHONE): In the 1950s, industrial scale models were starting to be applied to agriculture. Cattle once were maintained both for meat and for milk. They found very clearly that breeds that were bred specifically for milk production could yield higher amounts of milk.

JORDAN: Don Schrider is spokesman for the American Breeds Livestock Conservancy – or ALBC. Schrider says certain animals have fallen out of favor even if they have positive traits like withstanding pests in hot climates. That’s because the industrial holding pens for animals can control climates. There’s one main attribute an animal must have in the modern system.

SCHRIDER: Speed is the major component when you’re talking about growing a product like meat, Speed is what the industry is looking for.

JORDAN: Many say the problem with breeding this way is that a disease could strike the most common breeds, eliminating animals used for meat and milk. Experts agree that in the future, they might discover necessary genetic traits that exist in animals that aren’t popular now. The United States Department of Agriculture is storing semen and other reproductive materials to protect the more than 100 (B) billion dollar livestock industry. The Smiths are approaching the problem on a much smaller scale. David is trained in zoology and his wife Joanna is an ecologist. Their farm menagerie now includes 95 animals, counting Milking Devon cows, horses, and geese – Many are rare breeds.

JOANNA AND DAVID SMITH: It seems important to us to preserve a wider variety of genotypes. There are tremendous efforts -- sperm banks, seed plasms, and we have ‘em here walking around. So it sort of kills two birds with one stone. We’re able to fill our freezers and…
JOANNA: feel like we’re doing our part to keep them going.

JORDAN: Yet it wasn’t homegrown meats or frustration with farming trends that got the Smiths into their hobby. It was Joanna’s love for knitting.

NAT. SOUND: Combing sound like dog brush
JORDAN: This morning, Joanna combs out a small cloud of wool from one of the Shetland sheep she earlier sheared.

JOANNA SMITH: Right now I’m opening up the tips with a flicker brush.
Later, she’ll turn the wool into yarn for weaving or knitting.

The Smiths got one sheep for wool in the early 90s. And they now have 40 sheep, a number of which are registered Shetlands. Joanna’s able to easily handle and shear the sheep, since they’re about the size of a large dog. A renewed interest in fiber crafts has meant the Shetland breed is now recovering in numbers.

Creating demand for animal products like wool or meat is what’s necessary to maintain the breeds. That’s what Don Schrider says the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy is doing to keep the breeds going.

SCHRIDER: The reason all these breeds are rare is because they’ve lost their jobs. So what ALBC tries to do in our researching of the breed, we look to try and find niches where the breed might be able to try and succeed. We’re working with chefs.

JORDAN: The ALBC hosts taste competitions to introduce chefs to rare breeds. Schrider says their efforts are working. Since the ALBC started keeping a census 15 years ago, no farm animal in the U.S. has gone extinct. One future chef who will keep up this trend is the Smith’s 17-year-old daughter Molly. She wants to own a restaurant set on a farm and serve foods like Shetland lamb chops, Milking Devon steaks, and African goose egg omelets. Joanna hopes her family’s efforts will ensure the animals are still around when Molly’s restaurant materializes, and long into the future.

JOANNA: Maybe keeping these reservoirs of genetic variability will help especially in periods of rapid change as we seem to be entering into -- global warming, all of that.

JORDAN: For The Allegheny Front, this is Jennifer Szweda Jordan.



OUTRO: The United Nations says developing countries are at particular risk of losing indigenous animal breeds as industrial agriculture becomes more prevalent. The UN’s calling on countries to fund in vitro conservation to protect farm animal diversity. An international conference on Animal Genetic Resources will be held in Switzerland this September.