Meat · Breed · Short entry
Aubrac
A hardy beef breed from the Aubrac plateau in the southern Massif Central. It has a wheat-coloured coat with black extremities, dark-rimmed eyes and lyre-shaped horns. Once kept for work, milk and meat, it is now a suckler breed valued for its maternal qualities, with more than 270,000 cows in France in 2025.
From the monks of Aubrac to a suckler breed
According to the breed society, the monks of the Aubrac monastery began selecting these cattle in the eighteenth century. A herd book was created in 1893. In the early twentieth century the Aubrac was a dual-purpose animal used for work, milk and meat, found from the south and east of the Massif Central to the Mediterranean.
The decline began around 1930, when many burons (the summer mountain dairies) closed. After the Second World War, machines replaced the oxen and farmers turned to beef. From 1955 young males were sent to Italy for fattening, and in the 1960s Charolais bulls were widely used on Aubrac cows, so that pure Aubrac heifers became scarce. Breeders founded the Union Aubrac in 1979 to save the breed. Numbers rose from a low of 56,000 females in 1980 to more than 100,000 cows in 2000 and more than 200,000 in 2017.
