In 1929 the
Department of Agriculture of
New South Wales started an
Aberdeen Angus herd at the Agricultural Research Centre at
Trangie with stock imported from Canada. Various additions to the herd were made, from Canada, from the United States, from the United Kingdom and from other herds in Australia, until the
herd-book was closed in 1964. From about this time, various research projects were conducted at Trangie. In 1974 an investigation was begun of the correlation between growth rate and profitability, and of whether
feed conversion efficiency was higher in large or in small animals fed on grass. In the study, three separate herds were established: one of animals with a high rate of growth in their first year, one with animals that had shown low growth, and one randomly selected as a control group. These were called the High Line, the Low Line and the Control Line respectively. The Low Line herd started with 85 cows and some young bulls, and was closed to additions of other stock from 1974; it eventually numbered more than 400 head. To exclude possible effects of climate from the study, some stock was reared at
Glen Innes in northern New South Wales and at
Hamilton, Victoria. The experiment ran for nineteen years, by the end of which the Low Line animals were on average some 30% smaller than the High Line group. When the experiment ended in the early 1990s, the Lowline stock was auctioned off. A
breeders' association, the Australian Lowline Cattle Association, was formed in 1992, and the first
herd-book was published in 1993; it listed 150 cows and 36 bulls. Australia is the only country which reports Lowline cattle to
DAD-IS; the breeders' association has members in Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. == Characteristics ==