Rare Breed Conservation
Grassroots has worked closely for many years with the Rare Breeds Survival Trust in the UK and the Livestock Conservancy in the US. It was instrumental in establishing and populating the UK National Breed Monitoring System.
The Rare Breeds Survival Trust (RBST) is the umbrella organisation working to help ensure the survival of all our native breeds of farm livestock. They classify those breeds according to the ‘risk of extinction’ into categories 1 to 5, and then they monitor the remaining native breeds. Grassroots provide software systems to all but 4 of the breeds on RBST Watch List (Category 1 to 5) plus 13 of the native breeds.
The Livestock Conservancy (TLC) is the umbrella organisation working to conserve rare breeds in the United States. Grassroots co-director Libby Henson was their first CEO in the 1980 and carried out the first national census of American breeds. TLC uses the Grassroots system for a nymber of the breeds with which they work in an agency basis.
Kinship Analysis and Breeding advice - Grassroots provides a range of tools to help breed organisations and breeders make good breeding decisions with respect to conservation. These include ‘CheckMate which checks for common ancestors in potential matings and displays the results in a colour coded pedigree. Kinship – to check for the degree of relationship between potential parents. Sparks for full breeding advise based on kinship sand mean kinship bands. Access to PopRep for full population genetic analysis.
FAnGR Monitoring - In compliance with their international commitments to biodiversity Defra is obliged to monitor the population sizes of livestock breeds in the UK. Traditionally this was done via a once every ten year census carried out on paper. Grassroots worked with the FAnGR committee on a pilot scheme and now provides statistical data annually. This is taken from the Grassroots breed society databases and can be viewed here.
