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 into 'Priority', 'At Risk', 'Native' and 'Feral'. Grassroots provide software systems to 58 of the 'Priority' and 'At Risk' breeds plus 33 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 number of the breeds with which they work on 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 advice based on kinship and 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 the majority of the statistical data annually. This is taken from the Grassroots breed society databases and can be viewed here.
