Registrations of native-bred calves are up, as popularity of continental cattle falls. Aberdeen Angus-sired calves account for 21.6% our this year’s registrations, up from 19% in 2013. Meanwhile, the biggest three breeds, Limousin, Charolais and Simmental saw their popularity fall from 65.4% to 57.8% over the same period.

Other risers include Shorthorn which jumped from 3.6% to 5.4% and Hereford which doubled from 1.2% to 2.4% of calf registrations. Other growing breeds included Salers which rose from 1.9% to 2.8%, while British Blue were up from 3.1% to 3.9%.

The provisional calf registration data for Scotland comes from the British Cattle Movement Service (BCMS). These figures also show an overall fall in numbers of 1.6% compared.

According to Iain Macdonald senior economics analyst with Quality Meat Scotland, within this total there was a 2.3% decline of beef-sired calves but a 3.9% recovery for dairy-sired calves.

He said: “Compared to their five-year average for the January to June period of 2014-18, total numbers were down 0.7% with beef numbers falling 0.4% and dairy numbers by 2.7%. In general, beef-sired registrations have been relatively stable in recent years, but dairy-sired calf numbers have shown some volatility.”