White Park cattle belong to an ancient breed descended from wild white cattle that existed in Great Britain 2000 years ago. They are large, statuesque animals mainly with a porcelain white coat and contrasting black tips on their nose, ears, and around the eyes. The elegant wide-spreading horns are usually black tipped. During the Middle Ages nobility enclosed their parklands and the cattle that were inside them became the the White Park cattle herds of today. In the late 1800s many of the enclosed parks fell out of fashion and the cattle within those parks were culled.
In the early twentieth century a White Park Herd Book was established to record those cattle that were left but during the Second World War this was abandoned and most of the cattle were dispersed leaving only five herds. Because of the lack of genetic diversity within these five herds the White Park breed became largely inbred. In 1973 the Herd Book was re-established and numbers have steadily increased to in excess of a thousand pure-bred cows.
In 2017 eight White Park embryos were imported to New Zealand by Justine and Allan Rowland of Highlea farm in Canterbury. In July 2018, three White Park calves were born from those embryos – two females and one male. They were the first in New Zealand.
To expand the herd it was decided to wait until 2021 when the heifers would be old enough to provide a number of eggs for an In Vitro Fertilisation (IVF) programme. This was conducted at Xcell Breeding Services using imported semen from the White Park Society in the United Kingdom, and the resulting embryos were implanted in surrogate heifers. One of the White Park heifers was also mated with the New Zealand bred White Park bull. The following year eleven White Park calves were born. (Occasionally White Park calves are born jet black and three of those born were black.)