Creating a National Inventory – Grassroots needs our help

Each year Grassroots provide data to the UK National Inventory of livestock breeds. The most recent data was published on 14th May. UK Farm Animal Genetic Resources (FAnGR) breed inventory results 2025 statistics release - GOV.UK

This year, Grassroots Systems have been asked by Defra to create a national inventory of UK Native breeds cryogenically stored materials. It is hoped that this information will be used to begin a conversation about the possible need for a UK National Biobank of Native Livestock Breeds, in parallel to the one held for plant crop varieties.

The objective is to compile a comprehensive list of all the semen, embryos and other tissues held for all UK native breeds of sheep, cattle, pigs, horses and goats in the UK.  Then to carry out a risk assessment based on the effective population size and relative kinship of each breed, and the animals in the frozen collections.

Grassroots have asked us to share this with our members to find out what is stored by private individuals in an aim to make the national inventory as complete as possible.

This is a very short term initial project with a tight timescale to collect the initial information but we do want to ensure the inventory is as complete as possible for our breed.

If you have any frozen semen or embryos stored, please click the link below to complete a short survey.

https://forms.office.com/r/AG1QNJ65s6

Please respond by 24th July 2026.

Thank you for your participation.