Galloway

The Galloway and the Aberdeen Angus started in the same place. Both are black, polled Scottish beef breeds developed around the same time, the Galloway in the rugged southwest and the Angus in the northeast, and for fifteen years they shared a single herd book, opened in 1862.

They split in 1877, when the Galloway got its own book, and everything since has been divergence. The Angus was selected for fast growth on good feed. The Galloway was selected to thrive on poor forage in cold, wet country. One of them became the most commercially dominant beef breed in the world. The other became a specialist.

Before any of that, the native cattle of southwestern Scotland were simply hardy, thrifty and highly variable in color, horn and build. Breeders standardized them into a polled beef animal between the late 1700s and early 1800s while keeping the local adaptation, and the cattle became a significant part of the Scotland to England trade.

They reached the United States in the 1850s, and the American Galloway Breeders Association was founded in 1882.

What you get is a medium-sized, polled, long-coated animal that grazes light, mothers well, and produces excellent beef on ground that would not finish an Angus.