The Holstein Dilemma

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Announcer

Funding for this program was provided in part by Four Cats Fund through the Media Arts Center, San Diego. (calm music) (somber music) Even though we don't think necessarily about farm animals being endangered, our modern cultural systems have focused on using just a couple of breeds and using them very well. But that's left a lot of other breeds that we really need to pay attention to for the future of our agriculture. (calm music) What happens is when you look at Holsteins, especially highly selected ones, many of them have the same sire, so you reduce it there.

But when you look back, many of them have the same grand sire on their mother's side. And that's actually where a lot of that genetic erosion occurs, is that just this one produced really good cows, everybody had those really good cows, you breed those to the best bulls, but all those are related. Well over time, you just kind of collapse that genetic variation. And then, you know, with the numbers, you may be okay but you're still running a risk.

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Elara

Risk of what, what happens? You're running a risk of losing overall viability, vitality, and reproductive performance. (calm music) -

Elara

When we started out on this adventure, we met people from all walks of life. In talking with them about what we were doing without fail the question that was asked of us more than any other was, what is a heritage breed? I certainly had no clue in the beginning. There's a huge backstory behind this concept, and it starts with history.

Heritage breed animals are found all over the world, but since we're in the melting pot, we'll use the story of America. (calm music) (water splashing) In the late 1400s, 1500s, early 1500s if I'm correct, the Spanish gathered up cattle that were pretty close to the ports when they were starting their exploration of the Americas. They probably brought over only about 300 and they let them basically go feral, or they eventually went feral in the areas that they dropped those cattle Florida Cracker cows or Florida Cracker Cattle are descended from the cattle that the Spaniards brought here in 1521. The first cattle to set foot or hoof on what is now the continental United States landed with Ponce de Leon and the Spanish Inquisition and we know they have written records of him coming in 1521 on his second voyage and brought cattle, horses.

So we know we've phenotyped these cattle, we've DNA tested them, we know that they trace back to Spanish origin. Those foundation cattle really are responsible for a number of what we call, I guess breeds or whatever. Pineywoods is one, but Florida Cracker cattle is another, Longhorns is another, there are Corriente, I think are probably from those same Criollo cattle. And so Pineywoods is one of 'em.

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Elara

Animals brought to this continent may have started out as one breed, but they either adjusted to the new environment or they fell by the wayside. Adapt or die. Over time organisms can develop quite different tolerances from the original ancestor, with predictable genetic traits, especially if they're an isolated populations. We call that a land race animal.

Texas Longhorns are a breed that evolved in the United States from stock that was introduced by Spaniards and missionaries in the 1500s that colonized the area and then the animals went feral as missions were abandoned. So these animals evolved free from selection by man for about 350 years We do not say that they're pure Spanish because as the continental settlers came in they brought, other breeds were brought to Florida in the hundreds of years later, this was 1521. So from 1521 until about 1800 nothing else wouldn't mix with them, they were straight Spanish. They were a composite of different breeds that the Spaniards continued bringing on different voyages.

But as the settlers came, they may have brought some other breeds that, some of 'em they brought 'em, they didn't last long in Florida's wild because of the insects and the pests and heat and the just rough living in Florida, so only the Spanish origin cattle really survived and thrived and multiplied. -

Elara

And with migration of peoples, and no fences to keep things constrained we have regional natural selection occurring at a fantastic rate. (water splashing) And the waves of people and animals kept hitting our shores. So we have American Milking Devons, see a number of them behind. And we have about 50 here in Westbrook.

My family came here to Westbrook in 1635 and they brought some Devons with 'em and they hadn't left. So like I tell people, the family was too stupid or stubborn to go west in the movement and the Devons stayed here and you'll see Devons on the same land that it's been on eating the same grass in the same fields for almost 400 years. First of all, they're the first bovines, bovines are cattle that were part of the colonies. Plymouth Rock was founded in 1620 in actually November and they started farming it the following year.

King James of England had sent those people over here. they were headed actually to Jamestown, but they, it was late in the year and they got lost and so they ended up in Massachusetts and they started a colony at Plymouth, colony. They were without bovines. Well, my family, as many families did, came in through Plymouth and Plymouth is where the Devons came into the United States in 1623.

The Plymouth settlers came in 1620 on the Mayflower. Half the settlers died the first winter from disease, starvation, whatever. The next year another boat came with another 100 folks, no animals, and they said to the captain, you need to get word back to England, we need animals to sustain us. chickens, pigs, cows, sheep, whatever, we need animals, there's nothing here, it's raw land.

So in 1623 the boat came into Plymouth and it had red cattle from the South of England, which are what's now known as American Milking Devons onboard, along with other animals some chickens and the pigs and the goats and whatever they needed. And They came into Plymouth and they've been in New England ever since and they thrived and if you can imagine Plymouth in 1623 there were no veterinarians, there was no alfalfa, there were no fences, there were no improvements as we know agriculture today, it was raw woodland. And Devon strived on that, our cattle today, they pasture in these woods all summer with marginal grass and they eat a lot of leaves and shoots just the way they would have back then. And they do very well on that, they're very happy on that.

And they'll do well on good feed as well, but they'll get by very well on raw land, rough conditions. And so the King sent a bull and I think three heifers over in 1623 to Plymouth Rock. And so our animals bloodlines, we can trace all the way back to those animals in 1623 that came here. (calm music) (donkey braying) (Bob laughing) What's the matter, buddy?

They're lovers. They are just lovers, every one of 'em. That one's a baby, she's two and this is her mother. The breed was developed from European stock and the father of our country is the way we see it in, in our industry, the father of the American mammoth, and that's George Washington.

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Elara

The characteristics and traits of animals were influenced by both natural and human selection. (sheep baaing) Sheep! Come on in, good girl. These are an old English breed of sheep called Leicester Longwools.

The Leicester Longwool is a breed of sheep that was developed in the 18th century, same time period that we talk about hear in Williamsburg, by a man named Robert Bakewell. Robert Bakewell was pretty much a contemporary of George Washington being born in the first quarter of the 18th century and dying, Robert Bakewell died in 1795, George Washington died in 1799. And Robert Bakewell realized that farmers had to become more efficient. And he felt one way they can become more efficient was through their livestock for meat production.

So he started to work with sheep, cattle, pigs, and horses and he started to select them for very specific characteristics. Now, Robert Bakewell was the first person to look at livestock as a breed. And so we talk about rare breeds, well he was the first one to specifically make a breed. -

Elara

But, it wasn't only the Europeans doing the selecting. Now the Chickasaw on the East coast we're in sandy ground so they took the Spanish lines that they got and developed a different gate that works in the sand so that they're always moving forward and doing it very easily. If you look at the Marsh Tackies, they're perfect for those Sandy areas all along the Carolinas, down into Florida and Georgia. The Cherokee selected for gorgeousness in color and they loved flashy patterns.

If you look at some of the flashier horses out there, they're Cherokee lines. They also selected for gatedness, and those horses became part of the ancestry to the Tennessee walking horses. The reason the walking horse developed down south was because the Indians had already taken the gated lines that came with the Spanish and moved them forward into very effective, very comfortable horses for that terrain. So the whole walking horse phenomenon suits that area but it had already been started by the peoples in that area, the Creek, the Cherokee, we're selecting.

And so you see those lines becoming the walking horse lines eventually. -

Elara

And then there were the pioneers. Horace Greeley urged, go West, young man. And they did. And the Bent Brothers, which started the Bent's Old Fort in Southeast Colorado, at La Junta in 1832, they were a trading post.

They called it, Bent's Old Fort and it was the Bent Brothers and Saint Vrain started this trading post in 1832. And they used Milking Devons on the Santa Fe Trail from Bent's Old Fort, which was the furthest west, furthest south position that the United States had in 1832. So they traded for pelt with the trappers and the Indians and took them to Kansas City and then brought back mares and ammunition and beads and trinkets that were of importance to the people out here. And one load of furs would have been worth $250,000 in today's currency.

So the Bent Brothers and Saint Vrain became millionaires at the time, just by walking Milking Devons back and forth to Kansas City with furs. And between 1846 and 1866, which was 20 years of the great immigration to the West, there's approximately 500,000 people that immigrated to California, Oregon, and Washington and to parts in between. But there was about 4,000 oxen a day that went by Fort Laramie and Fort Carney. 30% of the oxen in the Chicago area in the 1890s were American Milking Devons.

So they were a breed of choice. (calm music) -

Elara

There were a lot of people coming to this country and what we already had here was populating like mad. So we had to increase output in our agricultural systems, both in crops and in livestock. Production efficiency was the new measure of success. More input meant more output.

Push the boundaries, produce. But within a production model that measures only one criteria for success, volume, systemic elastic city became less important. Because every other trait is secondary. And in our crop systems in the 1930s we learned where that lack of understanding can lead.

When agricultural systems based on output alone go bad they go really bad. We were just starting in this area to reach the point where the soils were being depleted of their natural nutrition and viability. And there were some experiments just beginning about the time of World War II for replenishing that with cover crops and with legumes and different rotations. There wasn't very much that they saw in the very beginning, in the 30s and the 40s.

They didn't really see big differences because the ground still had a fair amount of nutrition in it. But some of the people in the east had started to see this. But when the chemicals came in as a artificial replacement to nutrition in the soil and they started focusing on feeding the plants, instead of feeding the soil, it's quite a different perspective. They had some instant success with that.

And so then the focus turned away from feeding the soil just to feeding the plants. And we still had soil degradation and the dust bowl was part of that. -

Elara

Our livestock systems are going through the same evolution. Production is the best measure of success. Feed more, produce more, and produce it faster. And then artificial insemination was born.

So really it was starting to take off in the 60s, really the 70s and 80s is when it really took off. And so most farms, probably 80% of cows today, dairy cows are either the result of artificial insemination or at least have the opportunity to be bred artificially. A lot of times if it doesn't work, a farmer'll have a bull running around as well, kind of a clean up bull, we might call it, to get the cow pregnant if the artificial insemination didn't work The vast majority of Holstein cows and any dairy cow in the US is the result of artificial insemination today. Holsteins are effectively all related to basically 25 individual animals.

They've been breeding the best to the best to the best for so long that they're running into some problems now. The risk is over-representation. If I a really great bull, and this has happened in the Holsteins. Just because they have used one sire, and he might have, you know, 10,000 offspring.

There's no way in his whole life he ever could have made that many calves but he had a trait that everybody wanted so they bought the semen and he got too widely distributed. So that's the risk with it. With only 600 animals it's even more of a risk. Geneticists calculate something called effective population size.

And the effective population size is, it's less than 100. And basically what that means is that if we had 100 cows we could put all the genetic diversity in the Holstein breed into those 100 cows. And that sounds like a really tiny number, but it actually represents a fair amount of genetic diversity. 10 would be a really small, effective population size.

And there is concern over the last few years due to genomic selection technology that our genetic progress rate is speeding up even more quickly so how much will that effective population size drop even further? And, you know, we probably are pushing 50 now in some instances, so it is dropping and it is becoming a concern. But again, that's a concern for the Holstein breed, not cattle in particular, we're not gonna make cows go extinct. -

Elara

The experts don't agree on an exact count, but they pretty much all agree on one thing. Nearly the entire genetic pool of Holstein cattle in North America is less than 100 genetically distinct animals. Most of them are related to two bulls from the 1960s and about 90 cows. (somber music) About 90% of our entire dairy industry is dependent upon the Holstein cattle breed.

(suspenseful music) It's not just the Holsteins, and not just the dairy industry. The Holstein is just an example of what has happened with all breeds in most every area of industrial livestock production. Many breeds of agricultural animals that have developed over thousands of years are losing their place in a world that values production more than almost anything else. I read last week, actually, I tore it out, I don't know if I kept it or not.

It was an ad in a farming magazine basically boasting about the fact that 81% of our meat is now produced in feedlots. It's like, I'm not proud of that. And that's not natural, cows aren't meant to eat grain. And if you do any reading about it, you realize it was basically something the government started to use up surplus grains after World War II and as a result, we've changed the breeds that we use, the ones that do better with grain, which isn't natural for cows roaming, and I don't think it's healthy for anybody, cows or humans that are eating them, so.

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Elara

Less productive animals just can't compete. And like many languages and cultures, these breeds are going extinct. But we're losing more than just breeds. We're losing the characteristics and traits that used to be important to us.

Fertility, the ability to forage, ease of birthing, pest and disease resistance, temperament. There's always trade offs. There's always trade offs when you're selecting for an animal. And if I just single-mindedly select for production I probably will lose some other traits.

Well, I think, you know, back in the 60s, maybe even before, you had a lot of pressures of farmers to get bigger and to maximize the scale of their production and to make everything uniform. And I always thought the beauty of heritage breeds was that they were particularly well adapted to a specific situation, to a specific farmer, farm family, land, climate, whatever. And so I always thought it was a bit of a tragedy to be losing these kinds of heritage breeds, even as we were going to some kind of industrialized model. Which has some benefits, but it has big downsides as well.

(calm music) You've got to look at your whole animal. One example is leg confirmation issues in pigs and cattle, as we have selected, just selecting for carcass traits and growth traits. There are some leg problems, like crooked claw in cattle, two straight collapsed ankles. The pig industry made mistakes with that in the 80s, they have corrected some of those mistakes now, I want to make sure that cattle don't repeat some of those same mistakes.

So we need to be looking at the whole animal Come on sheep, come on girls. Baa! Katahdin and St. Croix and so on, have a propensity towards resistance.

But if I, you know, like I've got ewes that are generationally raised here that are, you know, super resistant to what we have here. You take 'em over to Missouri, you know, 90 miles east of me, and you may have, your parasites will be evolved to be different than mine. And my sheep would take some generations to be resistant to what's over there, right. -

Elara

So there's a constant evolution of the bugs to try and- And their life cycle's much faster so their evolution's faster. (calm music) So it's calculated that we have 9 billion chickens a year in the earth that are killed every year to feed us. But generally it's one or two type of chickens, and they are chickens that grow very fast. They selected after the war chickens that were particularly fat and grew very, very fast.

And one day I received in my farm by mistake six of these chickens that are called broiler, I mean, there is no misunderstanding about what they're meant to. They are meant to be broiled and eaten. And they started to grow like Frankenstein, bigger, bigger and bigger and bigger. They were doubled the size of the other one and they were very aggressive and ate, ate, ate, ate.

And I just couldn't believe it, you know, that you can manipulate so much within very few decades and create a new chicken, but that chicken has to be killed at seven or eight weeks because his weight would overwhelm his skeleton and if you let it live the bones would crack. Yes, he's bred to eat and get fat and that's it. To eat and get fat and be killed. Not just the fact that they're putting the fat on, but they're doing it in a very short period of time so that you can get them basically in and out of your program.

But today, a chicken has white feathers, it stands around. A Turkey is white feathered, it stands around and waits for the day that it's slaughtered. The characteristics, the characters of them, the characters are much more defined than the improved breeds. They bred out of them all the character to put them into a box stall or into a cage or into a filing crate.

So they bred out most of the character and left them as a benign object without much going for it. (calm music) -

Elara

We hear about the importance of diversity in wild ecosystems fairly frequently these days, but not so much in our agriculture. But it might be just as critical. Genetic diversity's something that we talk about all the time and regardless of the fact that you're either eating these animals or you're a vegetarian, biodiversity's important to everybody. And that's because without biodiversity, you can run into a lot of problems that you won't be able to fix if you don't have a diversity of genes to repair a problem.

And it's kind of like managing a stock portfolio. Nobody puts all their stock into just one particular company. You want a nice diverse portfolio so that if something were to happen to that one particular important stock you've got all the other to depend upon. (bright music) And I would say that the Holstein breeders in particular, they want to maintain the purity of their breed.

I mean, that's part of being a breeder. And so the simple solution is that if we run into a problem with Holsteins and we just cross Holsteins with Jersey or Brown Swiss or something like that, but as a breeder, that's dedicated to maintaining the purity of your breed you don't want to do that. So finding additional lines that can help you to maintain the diversity you need in your breed without compromising and bringing in genes from another breed is really important. And so you look out in the prairie, you don't see any monoculture.

You see great diversity, in the forest you see diversity. Along the seashore you see diversity, in the streams and the rivers, everywhere you look in nature you see great diversity, there's no monoculture. And when you have monoculture it's an artificial system. That means you have to have artificial means to sustain it.

Biodiversity, if you look at it in the broadest sense, creates the world in which we live, the kind of atmosphere we have, the kind of control of water, the kind of soil we have and everything else. 11,000 years ago, I mean, people, human beings differentiated from African apes, six to eight million years ago. Our ancestors invented agriculture 11,000 years ago, when they invented agriculture there were fewer people in all of Europe than there are in Carlsbad, San Diego County right now, about 100,000 people. The whole population of Europe would have about fit into the Coliseum.

And that means that it was agriculture that allowed them to build up large populations, but in doing so, they profoundly changed the world. About a third of the world's land surface, which is a very high percentage of all land that's capable of producing food, is already converted to grazing or crop agriculture. There is nowhere to go, but the healthiness of the ecosystem, the conditions that support us, we're tending to destroy gradually and that depends on species of organisms interacting in ways that we understand only dimly. It's the interaction of animal, people, system, and culture.

which is longer than you want it. But it's that interaction that kind of defines the whole thing for me. So we can't, you can take a piece out, you know, but then it's not the whole thing. So a lot of the industrial model, you kind of take out the piece of culture, you know, you still have the animal, you have a little bit less of the person, you know, and that's okay, it's a different system.

But the systems that most appeal to me are these systems that engage all four of those elements. (bright music) (audience chattering) (bagpipe music) -

Elara

Agriculture has been with us since before we had recorded history. And the animals we use are as diverse and expressive of who we are as people themselves. It's reflected in something as necessary and pleasurably basic as our food. In something as functional and expressive as our clothing.

As mysterious and meaningful as spirituality and religion. Our agriculture represents our cultures and identities. I first saw Highland Cattle at age 11 in Scotland. My mother, who is a Fraser.

So the plan was to go north, drive up to Inverness and go to the gathering of the clan. On the way we drove through all sorts of little villages and in one village we suddenly had had to come to a halt because a herd of Highland Cattle were being transferred through the village to go to another pasture. Seeing these beasts coming down, I, at age 11, I said, this is the breed I will have if I am gonna grow up and have cattle at some point. (sheep baaing) (woman singing in foreign language) And it's heritage, it's keeping alive the craft and art of spinning and weaving and of textile arts is to honor the skills and the knowledge that was learned by those previous peoples and carry it forward, because again, you know, yeah, I can go to the store and buy a wool garment or I can buy a synthetic fleece jacket, but I've lost something of my history when I do that unless I'm doing it for a very specific reason that I need something like that.

I think it's important to keep all of that going. This is Eagle Ridge Rose, she's one of our foundation mares. She's five years old and she has most of the characteristics of a true Suffolk Punch draft horse. Suffolk Punches were developed in England, they're very rare.

There's about 900 of 'em in all of North America. They were primarily used for farming, they weren't used as war horses during the 1000, 1100, 1200, 1300s. They were used primarily for farming in Suffolk and Norfolk counties in England. They almost went completely extinct following World War II, the numbers got down very, very small.

In 2015 and 2016 there were about 52 of these horses foaled in North America. We're really fortunate to have the seven mares, we've put them together over the course of the last half a dozen years. And we actually have three live weanling foals at home in Western Colorado. (calm music) (cow mooing) So we raised Belted Galloway Cattle, which we absolutely love.

Years ago we got a card that had a picture of one on it and I grew up with cows and I had never heard or seen of one of these and my husband said, someday, we're gonna have these. And I said, yeah. He went looking and found a herd in Connecticut in nearly 1990s we started with three and have grown our herd from those three. They are not registered, most of them are pure Belty, we do have a couple of mixes, but Belted Galloway cattle are what they call a heritage breed, they were developed in the Galloway region of Scotland in the 1500s.

They are very thrifty cow, can see quite shaggy, but they don't overheat and they don't get cold, they're out year round and do very well in whatever the weather is. Not a very big cow but for grass-based feeding that's what you want, you don't want them to have to stretch too far to reach that grass. And they grow out somewhat slowly but they're such an easy breed to work with and we just think they look so great on the hillside. We are a melting pot, but actually more like a stew pot, you know, the little pieces are still there, it's not melted.

And so we have different subcultures and that's gonna be more common here than it is in other countries. And so especially in Europe all the people that could follow rules stayed there. All the people that couldn't follow rules came over here. So you're German, I'm Norwegian, but our ancestors probably couldn't stand the rules so they came here.

So when you go to Norway, if they see conservation as a necessary cultural norm they all see it and they all do it and it all works. You know, whereas here you have this culture, that culture, the other culture, and so it has to kind of fit each one of those and you have to kind of target it. And we're just, we're not used to following rules, which is an advantage 'cause that's how this stuff gets saved but then it's a disadvantage 'cause now where do you go next? So it gets complicated.

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Elara

The world is changing quickly, but some animals that have evolved over time have a hard time keeping up. These breeds are dying out, in the same ways our cultures and economies are transitioning or disappearing altogether. These animals that were perfect for the American farm, in as much as the American farm no longer exists, neither do the animals. And the donkey is gonna be the same way.

Every one, and I'm not the only guy that produces donkeys, don't misunderstand me. There's plenty of guys out there doing this. Well, not plenty, there's not nearly enough, but their dilemma is the same as mine. I sell a male donkey, it goes off someplace to produce mules.

I bought Highlander to produce mules. I just happened to fall in love with the breed and so I sought out some jennies. Most of the guys don't, most people that buy them don't. They don't look for jennies because their mule production was what they bought the animal for in the first place.

It's my honest belief that the mammoth donkey will become extinct. I don't believe we'll save this animal. Well, like I said, and like I tell a lot of people when they ask me at farmer's markets, we went over the triple purpose, great milk, small quantity. So nobody milked them commercially.

Great beef but it takes you six or seven years to get a full-sized carcass. If you look at some of these cows that are full grown, they're six, seven years plus old. You can do that on a feed lot out west in 18 months. So if you're feeding America you're not doing Milking Devons.

And if you're doing bulk milk you're not doing Milking Devon. And oxen went west with covered wagons and the advent of tractors, they just, a lot of the old rare breeds went right by the wayside. Some did become extinct, some very critical like the Devons, the old American Milking Shorthorn, Dexters, a lot of the old breeds went right down the tubes and there wasn't just no demand for me. You have to be able to make money with an animal to keep the animal.

You have to have some sort of income to offset the cost. -

Elara

So at this point I asked myself, what can I do? I live in one of the largest cities in America. I can't raise a cow or a sheep or a horse. And the answer from farmers and ranchers across the country was this, economics is the driver.

If you buy meat or fiber or any kind of product from us we can afford to keep going, use your dollars. Saving a breed of forkfull at a time is absolutely critical to getting their numbers up. Because if there's no market, if someone won't eat an animal then they're a pet. And pets of this size are very expensive.

So the only way to get more people interested in keeping them is to have a market Has to be economically viable to be sustainable. That's one of the pillars of sustainability. Because people can't afford to raise all these animals just for fun. And it was the conservancy that really brought all that to focus and made us aware that there were breeds that were really important, but terribly endangered because the public had passed them by.

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Elara

One of the main reasons agricultural animals disappear is pretty basic. All things must have a purpose. And these animals are losing the battle. How can an animal that produces less compete?

Niche markets and consumer education have helped, but not quite enough as of yet. Once you get down to a certain number of animals you don't have enough distinct material to save it from falling victim to fatal inbreeding issues. It's like our Holsteins. Like a library, it's not just a question of volume.

Having 50 copies of the same book in a library is nowhere near as good as one copy of 50 different books. I think it's important unique breeds of animals, all different kinds of animals, it's important to save them. Because if you lose that genetics you've lost it. (calm music) -

Elara

So if we want to save these genetics, how do we go about it? The FAO, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations has come out with a couple of extensive reports on biodiversity in animal agriculture. And when you hear the term biodiversity you often think of wildlife, maybe of forests and jungles and, you know, wild type species. But oftentimes people don't realize that our farm animals are some of the most endangered animals in the world.

But anyway, the animals have come full circle, the pendulum is swinging in favor of the old heritage breeds again because people want to know what they're eating, they want to eat clean food and they want animals like this that do very well on grass and native feeds and do not need imported feed, they do not need soy, they do not need GMO foods, they don't need all the modern stuff that some of the other breeds demand to get that upper level of production out of them. So these heritage breeds are wonderful for the small farmer that wants one cow, two cows in the backyard, and make a little cheese, maybe raise a calf once in a while for a little freezer beef. Or if someone wants a pair of oxen, I mean, they're the probably the most economical to keep around. You never know when something might be needed because of climate change or a disease or something that one of these heritage breeds might possess, that might be the key link.

If I can make a living to support myself and all my employees and people are enjoying the ducks and the geese they're getting from us, that's a win-win, and we're also preserving breeds. So it's a win-win-win process in that regard. (calm music) -

Elara

Rachel Carson wrote in Silent Spring. "we stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost's familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed.

But at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road, the one less traveled by offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of the earth." The choice, after all, is ours to make. In a sense it's like having an artist with a palette of colors. You want all those colors available to you on your palette to paint a picture, and no one breed can be everything.

There is no such thing as a perfect breed that embodies all the characteristics of the breed. So if you were to say, well, agriculture is never going to change again. And the climate is not going to change again. And pest and diseases have stopped their own evolution and everything is going to remain static, including our own food system and our own human tastes.

If you could say all of those things then you might say, well actually we don't need any more diversity, we'll just have everything stay the way it is. None of those things are true, everything is changing. So in the future, we need the possibility of crossbreeding one breed with another so that we introduced traits from one breed to another, to fashion the kind of animal production system that we really need. And this has been going on since basically time in memorial.

This is how we got the breeds that we have today. So nothing terribly strange or immoral or unethical or weird or ahistorical about this, this has always been happening. And we simply need it to happen in the future because the bottom line is that our agricultural crops and our livestock breeds need to evolve. They're, my definition of extinction is when a breed loses the ability to evolve.

So heritage breeds are really important because they're part of your history, they're just as important as the Gettysburg Address or any of your historical monuments. They are part of the diversity of the tapestry of what your country is made up of and diversity is something that all humans love, they love color, they love change, they love the differences and that they represent diversity and diversity is always a good thing. But most importantly, they represent your future. They represent what you may need, what your grandchildren may need, what your great grandchildren may need.

And you owe it to those great-grandchildren to make sure those animals are there for those children. Agriculture is the most important success story for human life in 10,000 years. And we tend to forget that. And so a lot of these people actually have a mindset of agriculture as being broken and needing to be fixed.

It's like, no, no, no, no, no. It's the most amazing success we could have ever imagined. We just needed to take care of it. So I mean, it ain't broken, we just need to take care of it.

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Elara

Over the last three years in this film a heritage breed definition now also means something different to me from my original narrow definition. I've come to believe that one fundamental characteristic applies to all heritage breeds. They are a reflection of us. (bright music) -

Announcer

Funding for this program was provided in part by Four Cats Fund through the Media Arts Center, San Diego. To learn more about the Holstein dilemma or order a home video visit www.BackyardGreenFilms.com. (bright music)