A modern cattle breed

The Blonde d´Aquitaine breed is relatively young, established under the auspices of the French Ministry of Agriculture in 1962, as an amalgamation of three draught cattle breeds of southern France: Garonnais, Quersey andPyrenean Blond. Geneticaly Blonde d'Aquitaine are superior to most other beef cattle breeds for high daily gain, easy calving, good carcass classification, and high relation between carcass weight and live weight. There are presently around 600,000 Blonde d'Aquitaine cattle in France.

Two polled Blonde d'Aquitanien heifers enjoys the good summer at Vesterkjær Blonde d'Aquitaine

The first imports of genetic aterial to Denmark happened in 1972 in the form of semen, which was used in a larger, public cross breeding research project. The results were very positive, which probably triggered private breeders to import the first pedigree cows a few years later. A Danish herd Book and a breed society was established in 1975.

Performance of Blonde d'Aquitaine in Denmark

Today there are around 2.630 purebred Blonde d'Aquitaine cattle in Denmark in around 279 herds, and 818 purebred calves were born in 2005. Other beef breeds may have slightly higher daily gain than Blonde d'Aquitaine, and other have slightly higher classification of the carcass, but when it is all coming to an end, then Blonde d'Aquitaine is superior to all other beef breeds in Denmark with respect to net daily gain and net value of the daily gain - whether we talk about purebred (see Table 1) or crossbred animals. To this comes that the Ålestrup breeding value testing station documents that Blonde d'Aquitaine is in the very front when it comes to feed conversion rate.

Table 1: Key performance parameters for Danish Blonde d'Aquitaine in 2005, compared with the strongest competitors
of other Danish beef breeds, based on herd registrations (Source: Dansk Kødkvæg 2005, Årsrapport, Dansire)