Guernsey

What do Guernsey cattle look like?

The Guernsey is a dairy cow of middle-of-the-road build. A grown female carries some 450 to 500 kg, a bull 600 to 700, a weight that keeps her manageable in a milking herd. The coat comes in fawn, a wheaten shade, or red, and white markings frequently break the body colour into two tones. Both sexes grow horns. What sets the breed apart is the milk: it pours with a pale gold cast, the doing of beta-carotene, and it carries plenty of butterfat and protein. Recent decades of selection have stretched the frame, so today's cows stand taller on longer legs than the old island stock.

Where does the Guernsey come from?

The breed took shape on Guernsey, one of the small islands in the Channel, and enters the written record in the nineteenth century; anything earlier is guesswork. Cattle reached the island in medieval times, brought over to haul and plough. One theory holds that the stock descends from French imports: brindle-coated cattle out of Normandy, and wheaten animals resembling Brittany's Froment du Léon. Dutch blood may also have arrived during the eighteenth century. That same century, island cattle sailed to England in quantity, some of them French-born animals that had merely passed through. Law closed the door on French imports in 1819, though British cattle came until 1877. Alderney's wartime evacuees were absorbed into the breed after the Second World War.

What the Guernsey is known for

Temperament is a selling point: these cows are docile and hardy together. The traditional island animal had a long list of quiet virtues. She lived a long working life, delivered her calves with little fuss, made the most of grass, and, being small, turned feed into milk with little waste. Selection for output has cost the breed some of that. The modern animal is bigger and longer in the leg, and where Holstein-Friesian blood has been blended in, the old traits have faded furthest. The milk remains the standout, full-flavoured and dense in both fat and protein.

How the Guernsey is bred and kept

For centuries the island kept its cattle to itself. A law of 1819 shut out French animals, and British stock stopped coming after 1877, leaving the breed to develop in near isolation. Trade then ran the other way: live cattle, and later semen, went out in volume, and for a time those sales mattered greatly to the island's economy. In recent decades selection has chased size and yield, producing taller, longer-legged cows, and some herds have crossed with Holstein-Friesians. Pedigrees are recorded by breed societies in Britain, the United States and internationally.

What the Guernsey is kept for

Milk is the whole point of the breed, and herds are generally run for nothing else. The figures are respectable: roughly 6,000 litres per cow in a year, with fat at 5% and protein at 3.7%, both high readings. The beta-carotene in the milk acts as a provitamin of vitamin A and colours it a warm gold, a look the island's dairy has long been known for. Draught work, the reason cattle first came to the island in the Middle Ages, has passed into history; the modern Guernsey is a milk cow, pure and simple.

The land and climate of the Guernsey

The breed's home ground is a small island, and the traditional cow was a good grazer that made the most of pasture. Hardy with it, the animal has travelled widely: distribution is now world-wide, after big export waves to England in the eighteenth century and to the United States early in the twentieth.

Keeping Guernsey cattle

The old-style Guernsey asked little of her keeper: she calved readily, did well on plain grazing, and kept producing for years. Because she was small, more of what she ate ended up as milk rather than as body. Farmers who prize those qualities favour the traditional, compact type over the taller modern strains.

Related breeds and crosses

The Guernsey belongs to a small island family of three: itself, the Jersey, and the Alderney, which no longer exists. Ancestors may include Norman brindle cattle, wheaten Breton stock of the Froment du Léon kind, and possibly some Dutch influence. Where farmers have crossed it, the partner has usually been the Holstein-Friesian.

Numbers, conservation and the herd book

Early in the twentieth century, large shipments of Guernseys crossed the Atlantic to the United States, and for a while the export of cattle and semen kept the island's economy ticking. The trade has since narrowed. Fewer than 2,500 animals are registered in the United States each year, and the world population is thought to be under 10,000, which earns the breed a place on the watch list of the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy. The FAO's 2007 assessment was calmer, listing the Guernsey as not at risk.

From the Guernsey

Questions people ask about Guernsey

Good reading and sources

• Encyclopaedia BritannicaArticle

• Guernsey cattle on WikipediaEncyclopedia
• More photos on Wikimedia CommonsPhotos and video
• Wikidata recordOpen data