Husbandry strategies matching the ideals and interests of organic farming need to support and promote natural, animal-friendly and ecological processes on organic farms. This means that the animals' genetic (performance) predispositions need to relate with their environment, especially regarding feeding (site-appropriate husbandry), that the animals' insemination should happen according to natural breeding (species-appropriate husbandry), and that the husbandry is to be aligned to health and robustness characteristics to a significant share (animal and environmentally-friendly husbandry).
A good method for attaining these goals is “line breeding with cow families", or kin breeding, as described e.g. in Nauta et al. 2005 and Baars et al. 2005.
The aforementioned method is appealing to farmers which would like to become independent of husbandry strategies (geared towards rather high milk performances and concentrate feeding) not belonging to the farm, and which attach importance to natural breeding and intend to breed animal that are adapted to their farms. As this concept requires sufficient knowledge to choose farm-appropriate breeding goals and selection strategies, as well as good animals from one's own farm or partnered farms and at the same time avoiding high degrees of inbreeding, as well as keeping the bulls appropriately and without great risks, advisory services and support are required for cow-family husbandry on organic farms. Within this project, organic farms in Switzerland and Southern Germany are offered such advisory services and support on two different intensity levels.
The research part includes expert surveys on the effects of inbreeding in cattle herds. Additionally, research is carried out on the question of whether or not there are differences between cows on organic farms bred via natural breeding and via artificial insemination.
