‘The world’s most expensive cattle’: Booming in Brazil, dwindling in India

As the cow licks her offspring, helping it to its feet, Dr M Mutha Rao, the officer in charge of the LAM Farm, tells The Indian Express, “This calf was born out of IVF-embryo transfer technology. With similar breeding techniques, we have been maintaining the purity of the breed over the past 30 years and eight generations of cattle.”

While it has so far been a long and lonely fight at the LAM Farm to conserve the Ongoles, one of the 53 indigenous cattle varieties in the country, the breed is having its moment under the Brazilian sun as “the most expensive cattle in the world”. In February, an Ongole purebred cow, Viatina-19, was sold for a whopping 4.38 million USD (25.7 million Brazilian Real or INR 40 crore) in Brazil’s Minas Gerais. It’s a breed that thrives in Brazil – about 80 per cent of the country’s 226 million cattle are Ongoles.

In Brazil, the world’s top beef exporter where the cattle industry is a primary driver of its economy, the Ongoles are raised for their meat. As the country attempts to capture newer markets, Brazilian breeders are racing to raise bigger, meatier supercows such as the Viatina-19.

Despite government efforts to promote conservation and rearing of desi breeds, farmers prefer exotic and crossbred cattle that yield more milk. (Express illustration by Abhishek Mitra)

The snowy-white, muscular Viatina-19, weighing 1,100 kg, was bought at an auction by three breeders — Casa Branca Agropastoril, Agropecuária Napemo, and Nelore HRO — who will now use her to breed cattle with superior characteristics based on her genetic traits.

However, back in India, the original home of the Ongoles, the breed is facing the threat of extinction, its numbers halving from 15 lakh in 1944 to 6.34 lakh in the 2019 Livestock Census. In a country where the population of indigenous cattle has dropped by nine per cent between 2007 and 2012 and six per cent between 2012 and 2019, the fate of the Ongole breed is somewhat predictable. The price of the cattle, too, is relatively low in India – Rs 1 lakh a cow and Rs 10 to 15 lakh for a prized bull.

Despite government efforts to promote conservation and rearing of desi breeds through schemes such as the Rashtriya Gokul Mission (RGM), launched in 2014, farmers prefer exotic and crossbred cattle that yield more milk when compared to the indigenous varieties. This is reflected in the 29.5 per cent jump in the population of exotic and crossbred cattle – from 39.73 million in 2012 to 51.47 million in 2019.

On the need to conserve the indigenous breeds, Mutha Rao says, “They are the most farmer-friendly cattle. Their yield and characteristics suit our climate, soil and farmers. They are superior to several crossbred animals in more ways than one, including disease resistance and strength.” The Ongoles, he adds, are also known for their heat tolerance and ability to survive on low fodder.

Rao says they focus on the Ongoles at the LAM farm because the breed is “India’s pride”. “It is this indigenous cattle which helped our farmers till the hardest of terrains to plant crops for the agrarian revolution in the country. Abroad, they have contributed to the economy of several countries,” he says, adding that the Ongoles are tied to the country’s culture. “The Nandi bulls in Shiva temples have a distinct hump. That’s thanks to the Ongole breed. We need to do more to preserve it.”

The Ongole history

About 40 km from Guntur, in Vijayawada, an 88-year-old retired government breeder and researcher A Madhusudhana Rao sat in his two-bedroom home in Veterinary Colony to talk about the breed – from folklore to hard facts. “We can date the history of the Ongoles back to the mid-19th Century, when British researchers took stock of this unique breed,” Rao says.

According to the writings (1885-1936) of some of these officers who were all doing research on animal husbandry in pre-Independent India – among them, John Shortt, a veterinary surgeon in Madras who wrote many books and papers, including A Manual of Indian Cattle and Sheep; Lt Col. W D Gunn, an army veterinary surgeon, and Capt R W Littlewood, Deputy Director of Agriculture, Livestock, Hosur Farm – the Ongole cattle had distinct physical traits. They wrote that the cattle had an erect and “well-carried head”, greater breadth of forehead, a huge hump, and large and heavy dewlap.

Back then, as Latin America’s indigenous breeds were smaller in stature, the Ongole bulls were exported with government permits to countries there. There are records of an Ongole cow and two bulls reaching Brazil’s shores as early as 1885. “In total, about 7,000 Ongole cattle have left India to be bred in South America,” says Mutha Rao, adding that Brazil’s agricultural revolution rode on the contribution of the Ongoles. “In Brazil you see street signs which say ‘Nelore’. The breed and its features are part of their cultural memory,” he says.

Director of Andhra Pradesh’s Animal Husbandry Department, Dr Damodar Naidu, explains, “An Ongole cow’s skin twitches where you touch it. In Brazil, when they were troubled by the TseTse fly infestation in cattle, the Ongoles were god-sent. They would just shrug off the flies”.

The export of the Ongoles, however, was stopped in the 1960s due to restrictions imposed on the sale of cattle for meat. “The last of the exports we had was from Chintaladevi and Karavadi farms in Andhra Pradesh from where two prized bulls were exported to Brazil for breeding,” says Damodar Naidu.

The Ongoles were known to produce offspring who looked just like themselves and had similar genetic make-up. “This ability to replicate their traits is a prized possession in the breeding community,” he says.

In 2023, the Ministry of Fisheries, Animal Husbandry and Dairying announced a proposal to change the Livestock Importation Act, 1898, to include the export of live bovines, sheep, goats and pigs. However, the bill was withdrawn following widespread outcry.

Guntur, Prakasam and Nellore districts of Andhra Pradesh are the breeding tracts of the Ongole cattle in the state.

A looming crisis

At the LAM farm in Guntur, the Ongole cows and bulls stand grazing in their neatly kept sheds. There are about 10 large sheds to house 294 cattle.

Madhusudhana Rao says that while the physical traits of the Ongoles in India have largely remained the same, their milking ability has altered over time.

While Shortt in 1885 had described the Ongoles as “excellent milkers who give 18 quarts (17 litres) of good rich milk per day”, in 1909, Gunn wrote that the milking ability had reduced to 11 to 14 lbs (4.9 lt to 6.3 lt) per day. Around three decades later, in 1936, Littlewood found the daily milking average to be 10.5 lbs (4.76 lt).

The depreciation of the milking ability, according to Rao, had much to do with the kind of breeding Indian farmers did. “In India, the bulls were used for draught or heavy labour. In the Brahmini bull breeding system, which was developed by indigenous farmers, they promoted strength and stature over milking abilities while breeding,” says Rao.

With slaughter for meat banned in most states and the cows never counted among the high-milkers, it’s the Ongole bulls which were considered prized possession in India as they carried heavy loads and survived ploughing even when the sun beat down for hours. But that, too, changed when mechanisation took over the farms.

A revival plan

In Guntur’s LAM farm, veterinarians feed the newborn calf colostrum – the mother’s first milk that’s rich in antibodies and antioxidants.

At a distance, nine bulls lumber on, lugging iron bars as part of their exercise regimen. “The exercise is a must so that the bulls produce good quality semen. We have 294 cattle in this farm now, including nine Ongole bulls. This is the result of continuous breeding efforts,” says in-house veterinarian Dr K Sunny Praveen, stroking one of the cows.

The breeding efforts at LAM include Ovum Pick Up (OPU)-Invitro Fertilisation (IVF) and Embryo Transplant – technologies used for advanced pure breeding.

“Through these processes, we select the best of the sires and dams (father and mother) and produce the best calves,” says Mutha Rao. In many of the sheds are calves born through this rigorous selection process, each stamped with the letters ET (Embryo Technology). “Now, the majority of the calves in the farm are technology-born,” says Rao.

Besides rearing the calves, the farm also supplies superior bull semen and embryos to farmers who want to rear Ongole cattle. But in Andhra Pradesh, all six of the major farms rearing Ongole cattle are government-managed.

Mutha Rao says the LAM farm maintains records of lineage, much like it’s done in Brazil. “There, it is possible to know the first sire and dam of any given cattle because they have been keeping lineage records for the past many decades. This should be replicated across our country – a book of animal family trees,” says Rao.

It’s another day at the LAM farm and the interns have turned up to watch the cattle being immunised. The cows line up to get their shots that will inoculate them from deadly diseases such as hoof rot. The calves born the previous day are already running around in their sheds.

“Ongoles can withstand anything. We should just make it conducive for them to thrive,” says Mutha Rao.