"The GAEC exists thanks to the work of 5 generations of dairy farmers since the beginning in the 1960s, and the production of cheese in summer pastures. My grandparents milked cows of the Brune and Montbéliarde breeds, joined in the 90s by my mother, Gisèle. In 2003, they decided to stop dairy farming and switch exclusively to veal calf rearing. When I set up in 2011, we created a GAEC and built up a dairy herd, a barn and a cheese dairy. In 2016, my brother David joined the GAEC, bringing with him a herd of Gasconne suckler cows (the local breed here!).

Variability management is an essential issue for breeds with small populations that are unable to source from third countries. If the selection system were not careful to increase the number of origins and the value of original pedigrees, this would lead to a multiplication of genetic anomalies and, in the long term, the impossibility of working with purebreds.

Genomics has been used in our breed for 7 years now. For farms that have been genotyping from the outset, and have thus contributed to the creation of the reference population, we can consider that most of the animals in their herd have been genotyped.