🇭🇳 The cattle breeds of Honduras

Cattle keep a quiet place in Honduras, a mountainous farming country whose export story is told in coffee and bananas. Raised the traditional way for home use through the 1800s, cattle entered trade when beef became an export in the 1950s, helped by new roads and farm credit.

• In the 1800s, traditional cattle raising produced no Honduran export worth shipping.
• Beef, with cotton and coffee, entered Honduras's export list for the first time in the 1950s.
• New roads, farm credit and strong world prices opened the way for beef exports after 1950.
• Mountains confine Honduran farming to narrow coastal strips and a few fertile valleys.
• Agriculture made up 14% of Honduras's GDP in 2013, led by coffee exports.

Cattle in Honduras

Honduran cattle keeping is a quiet, small-scale affair in a country where farming earns most of the national living. Through the 1800s, cattle were raised the traditional way, mainly for home use beside subsistence plots, and yielded nothing worth shipping abroad. The land itself is the limit: Honduras is rugged and mountainous, so farming of every kind crowds into narrow coastal strips and a handful of fertile valleys, many now worn out. Change came in the 1950s, when governments spent on roads, farm credit and technical help, and beef, with cotton and coffee, entered the export list for the first time. Cattle never rivalled bananas or coffee. Its economic ties to Central American neighbours ran through the 1960s Common Market, though its industry stayed small beside those of El Salvador and Guatemala.

Milk, butter and beef

Beef is the cattle product that appears in Honduras's export record. Through the nineteenth century, cattle goods stayed at home while silver from the mines near Tegucigalpa filled the shipping lists. After 1950 beef stood beside cotton and coffee as a fresh export earner, and by 1960 the farm trade had widened to include sugar, timber and tobacco. The great earners, though, were crops: coffee took the lead from bananas in the mid-1970s, and bananas themselves climbed back to 57% of their pre-Mitch level by 2000. Beef, then, is the strand of cattle keeping that reached beyond the farm gate.

Today

Cattle keep a small place in the Honduras of today. Agriculture brought in 14% of GDP in 2013, but the export lead belongs to coffee, with bananas recovered from Hurricane Mitch and farmed shrimp also important. Money sent home by Hondurans working abroad now exceeds a quarter of national income. Beside these, cattle raising carries on as it long has, a modest, home-centred strand of the farm economy.