🇲🇽 The cattle breeds of Mexico

Mexico's cattle are newcomers by the standards of its farming. Spanish colonists brought the first herds in the early colonial period, and their descendants, known as criollos, are still raised today. Cattle have shared the stage with crops such as maize, often grazing ground that no plough had touched.

• Mesoamerican Mexico kept no large domestic beasts; cattle arrived only with the Spanish.
• Criollos, descendants of Spanish imports, are still raised today.
• Haciendas ran cattle and sheep at scale; small farms fed local markets.
• In the Bajío, growing wheat farming pushed cattle onto marginal ground.
• Spanish herds often damaged indigenous crops in central Mexico.

Cattle in Mexico

Mexican cattle keeping begins with the Spanish. The older farming of Mesoamerica, one of the world's early homes of agriculture, knew no large tamed animals: turkeys, Muscovy ducks and small dogs were the creatures people raised. Cattle arrived with colonial rule, alongside horses, sheep, goats and the donkeys and mules that carried loads, in the movement now called the Columbian Exchange. Haciendas, the big private estates, ran cattle and sheep at scale, and the imported animals left descendants still known as criollos. Beside the country's crops, maize above all, cattle have always played a modest part in Mexican farming.

The breeds

One word does the work here: criollo. When the Spanish brought their livestock in the early colonial period, cattle among them, the animals bred on in Mexican herds. Their descendants are still raised today under the name criollos, a general label for colonial stock gone local rather than the name of a single breed. For cattle keepers it points to bloodlines reaching back to those first herds, five centuries old and still at work in the countryside.

Regions and communities

Place made a difference. Central Mexico carried a long indigenous farming tradition, dense with fields and villages, so roaming Spanish cattle were a nuisance there, trampling crops, and grazing had to look for room elsewhere. The Bajío, a marshy lowland with no silver and no settled population to draw labour from, suited cattle first: herds could spread over land nobody had farmed. When Zacatecas and Guanajuato boomed with silver, feeding their towns made the Bajío a grain region, and cattle were nudged onto marginal land as dams and canals brought large scale wheat growing to the fore.

Today

Cattle keeping today sits inside a farming sector that is now a small slice of the national economy, though it remains historically and politically weighty. Policy since the late twentieth century, under NAFTA, has favoured large commercial holdings, a return to something like the old estate scale. The most visible cattle legacy is criollo stock, colonial imports still raised on Mexican ground. The farm export trade, mostly crops, sends sixty per cent of its goods to the United States.