Long in the Horn: An Agricultural Anthropology of Livestock Improvement Tad Brown Abstract This article explores the evolutionary history of Pineywoods cattle, an endangered breed of landrace cattle in the southeastern United States, including recent efforts by the Pineywoods Cattle Registry & Breeders Association to conserve the remaining diversity within the population. The human dimension of the breed’s development is impor- tant to both the history of selection within herds and the ongoing process of conservation. There exists a need for applied anthropology to engage with in situ animal genetic resource conservation because the sociality of livestock breeding necessarily involves both humans and livestock. [agricultural anthropology, cattle breeds, agrobiodiversity, agricultural history] The Founders’ Effects The Pineywoods cattle breed underwent a major population decline during the 20th century related to changes in the livestock production system of the southeastern United States. Recent efforts to conserve genetics in the remaining Pineywoods population showcase the history of family “strains” in the cre- ation and preservation of diversity within the breed. 1 This paper explores how the conservation of genetics within the Pineywoods population relies on the repro- duction of these cattle strains. In effect, the history of strain divergence has implications for how cattle owners continue to make breeding decisions. The origins of Pineywoods cattle in the Americas and the subsequent development of family strains were both bottlenecks—evolutionary events that limited the size of the effective population. The repro- ductive isolation of the founder population enabled the cattle gene pool to differentiate over time from the parent population, and further distinctions arose between Pineywoods strains as cattle keepers “closed their herds” by sourcing breeding stock from within the herd itself. Today, breeding for purity of descent within each strain is intended to conserve genetic diversity in the Pineywoods cattle that resulted from separation in the past. As discussions about livestock conservation increasingly focus on genetics, the importance given to isolation can ignore the role of human relations in the production of diversity. Telescoping the history of Pineywoods cattle to the formation of distinct family strains honors the legacy of herd founders, but new animals did enter into founding herds, older strains founded newer strains, and animal exchange played a part in strain survival. If the goal of conservation is to rescue the diversity within the Pineywoods breed, the processes driving strain diversification deserve our attention. These processes are as social as they are evolutionary. Emphasis on isolation can inadvertently discourage the movement of animals between people and quickly become counterproductive as herd-size and strain populations shrink. Over the Ocean and Through the Woods The conservation of agricultural biodiversity is a defining topic of agricultural anthropology (Rhoades 1986). A growing concern about genetic erosion and the catastrophic potential of uniformity in food systems compelled anthropologists to study agricul- tural change in a ten-thousand-year time frame (Rhoades 1991). The advancement of “off-types” by human selection is the story of domestication itself—a revolution of the Neolithic that continues to this day (Harlan 1992). For good reason, the bulk of the work on the issue of agricultural biodiversity conservation has focused on the plant kingdom, yet the need exists for similar and novel research on livestock diversity. Worldwide, the growing popularity of a handful of breeds has led to the decline of landrace livestock Tad Brown is a PhD candidate at the University of Georgia. His doctoral research with farmers in the Gambia, West Africa, looks at how selection practices and theories of heritability relate to livestock breed dynamics in the tsetse zone. Culture, Agriculture, Food and Environment Vol. 36, Issue 1 pp. 8–16, ISSN 2153-9553, eISSN 2153-9561. © 2014 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/cuag.12025