Meat · Breed · Short entry
Podolica
The grey, long-horned cattle of inland southern Italy, kept extensively on poor pasture from Abruzzo to Calabria. Once mainly a draught animal, it also gave milk for caciocavallo cheese. It is now selected for beef. ANABIC counts about 100,000 head, 25,000 of them registered.
Podolian cattle in the south
ANABIC places the Podolica among the Podolian cattle, large long-horned animals descended from aurochs domesticated in the Middle East. Their arrival in Italy is not settled. One account brings them with the Huns in 452, another with long-horned cattle from Crete from the first century BC. Today the breed lives mainly in the interior of Abruzzo, Basilicata, Calabria, Campania, Molise and Puglia.
Calves are born wheaten (fromentino) and turn grey by about three months. Bulls darken almost to black, and cows can be light grey to nearly white. The horns are crescent-shaped in bulls and lyre-shaped in cows: grey until two years, then whitish-yellow at the base with black tips. Historically the Podolica was used mainly for draught and secondarily for meat and milk, the milk being suited to caciocavallo. Selection now aims at beef.
How it connects
Breed
- similar Romagnola
