Kerry

What do Kerry cattle look like?

A Kerry is a small dairy cow, black almost all over, with the only white showing as a little at the udder. Her horns are whitish and tipped with dark, though most animals have them removed young, since the breed is usually dehorned. A grown cow weighs about 350 to 450 kg, an easy size for a small farm. The milk is her other signature: its fat sits in very small globules rather than large ones, a detail that decides how well the milk turns into cheese, butter and yoghurt.

Where does the Kerry come from?

Kerry cattle belong to Ireland, and students of the breed count them among the oldest milk cattle in Europe. The story told of them is that they spring from small black cattle carried across the sea by people of the Neolithic age, the first farming era. A second thread ties them to the Celtic Shorthorn, thought to have reached Ireland as long ago as 2000 BC. If those accounts hold, they were among the first cattle anywhere to be bred chiefly for milk rather than for work or meat. The damp southwest of the country suited milking all year round, and people of Celtic times made the surplus keep as butter and cheese. From these beginnings the breed was shaped for the small family farms of Ireland's south and west.

What the Kerry is known for

What sets the Kerry apart is its light touch on the land. Being small, it disturbs wet soil far less than heavier breeds do, which matters in rainy country where hooves can ruin a field. The breed was shaped for small subsistence farms, places where milk for the household came before anything else. It is classed as a rare breed, though its numbers have climbed back from a very low point in the 1980s.

How the Kerry is bred and kept

Kerrys are kept as pedigree stock, meaning animals whose descent is written down and tracked. That record-keeping came into its own when the breed nearly slipped away in the early 1980s; patient pedigree breeding has since built the numbers up again. A herd is kept at Farmleigh, an estate that belongs to the Irish state, so the breed stays on show to visitors. On the small farms it was made for, a Kerry serves as the house cow, giving a family its milk.

What the Kerry is kept for

Milk is what the Kerry is for; from early on it was bred for the pail, while other breeds were being shaped for work in harness and for meat. A cow gives about 3,000 to 3,700 kg of milk over one lactation, the milking span between two calvings. The fat in that milk sits in very small globules, and it is that quality which makes the milk so good for cheese, butter and yoghurt. In Celtic times the steady supply was stored as butter and cheese to keep it.

The land and climate of the Kerry

Kerry cattle come from the southwest of Ireland, where the climate allows cows to be milked all year. The breed was shaped for the small farms of the south and west, country of steady rain and soft fields. There its light build earns its keep: in high-rainfall areas a Kerry damages the soil less than a larger cow would, so wet pasture holds up. It is a creature of temperate, rain-fed country.

Numbers, conservation and the herd book

Kerry cattle are counted as rare. In 1983 the world held only about 200 pedigree animals, though numbers have since grown. An 1818 import took the breed across the Atlantic to the United States, where it flourished through the nineteenth century before thinning to scarcity by the 1930s. Today North America has only a few herds, most of them built on more recent imports into Canada.

From the Kerry

Questions people ask about Kerry

Good reading and sources

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