The best breed of cattle in the world comes from Piedmont.
The La Granda farms are located on the fertile plains around Cuneo. Piedmont has always been a land of livestock and a storehouse of great agricultural and foddering traditions.
Even though the Piedmontese breed of cattle has unparalleled culinary and nutritional characteristics, over the last decade there has been a significant reduction in the number of animals. To farm the bianche (whites), as the Piedmontese cattle are called in the province of Cuneo, has for various reasons become less profitable than dairy-cow farming. Many small-scale farmers, not feeling sufficiently valued by a market which increasingly rewards industrialization, have switched to other activities, leaving the field open to fatteners and traders whose main interests do not lie in protecting farming culture.
Half of Piedmontese livestock farms are family run, but in recent years the number of animals has been drastically reduced to just 360,000. The average age of Piedmontese breeders is increasingly rising, with fewer and fewer young people choosing to stay on the farm and continue the work of their fathers by dedicating themselves full-time to farming.
La Granda was created at the end of the 1990s with the aim of preserving and improving the traditional techniques of farming Piedmontese-breed cattle, which soon became a Slow Food Presidium.
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