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Red Angus Association of America
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In 1945, various cattlemen throughout the United States started selecting and breeding reds cropped from the best black Aberdeen Angus herds in America. In 1954, seven visionary breeders gathered to establish a unique breeder's organization known as the Red Angus Association of America (RAAA). Rejecting the norms of the times, the RAAA was designed around the new scientific principles of performance testing. Founding member George Chiga explained, "The establishment of Red Angus (Association) was more than an accumulation of numbers. It was dreaming of a new approach." In August of 1954, the Association's first president, Waldo Forbes, Sr., summed-up the vision of the founding members:
"The policy of the (Red Angus) Association is to discourage the more artificial practices in purebred cattle production and to place its faith instead in objective tests, consisting for the most part of comparisons within herds of factors of known economic importance and known heritability... By making this an integral part of the registration system, Red Angus breeders feel that even faster progress can be made toward the ultimate goal of more efficient beef production."
According to RAAA's first executive secretary, Sally Forbes, "Waldo was above all interested in developing a breed performance program rather than building a new breed for its own sake and the charter members of the Association were...much of the same mind." So, from the beginning, performance data was required for registration of all cattle. The ultimate goal was to initiate a system to objectively evaluate and select cattle based on traits of economic importance, and to build an Association that would adopt and embrace scientific innovation.
Recently hybrids of the Red Angus breed have become quite popular. Crossing with Gelbvieh (Balancer), Limousin (LimFlex), and Simmental (SimAngus) have taken the benefits of both European and British breeds to create highly marketable cattle.