Australian Lowline
Bull
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| Conservation status | FAO (2007): no data |
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| Country of origin | Australia |
| Standard | Australian Lowline Cattle Association |
| Use | beef |
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| Coat | solid black, occasionally solid red |
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The Australian Lowline is a modern Australian breed of small, beef cattle. It was the accidental result of a selective breeding experiment using black Aberdeen Angus cattle at the Agricultural Research Centre of the Department of Agriculture of New South Wales at Trangie. It is among the smallest breeds of cattle, but is not a dwarf breed.
In 1929 the Department of Agriculture of New South Wales started an Aberdeen Angus herd at the Agricultural Research Centre at Trangie with stock imported from Canada. Various additions to the herd were made, from Canada, from the United States, from the United Kingdom and from other herds in Australia, until the herd-book was closed in 1964. From about this time, various research projects were conducted at Trangie. In 1974 an investigation of the correlation between growth rate and profitability, and of whether feed conversion efficiency was higher in large or in small animals fed on grass, was begun.
In the study, three separate herds were established: one of animals with a high rate of growth in their first year, one with animals that had shown low growth, and one randomly selected as a control group. These were called the High Line, the Low Line and the Control Line respectively. The Low Line herd started with 85 cows and some young bulls, and was closed to additions of other stock from 1974; it eventually numbered more than 400. To exclude possible effects of climate from the study, some stock was reared at Glen Innes in northern New South Wales and at Hamilton, Victoria. The experiment ran for nineteen years, by the end of which the Low Line animals were on average some 30% smaller than the High Line group.
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