By CINDY LADAGE
Illinois Correspondent

PALM COAST, Fla. — The Florida Agriculture Museum is into preserving Florida Agricultural history, including information about a couple of special breeds: Cracker cattle and Cracker horses.

Florida’s Cracker cattle are one of the oldest breeds in the United States. They are descendants from the Spanish cattle, brought to the New World beginning in 1493. “As Spaniards colonized Florida and other parts of the Americas,” museum literature explained, “they established low-input extensive open-range systems typical of Spanish ranching.”

With Florida being an open-range state until the end of the 1940s, the Cracker cattle developed in the Florida wilderness. The cattle were criollo, of Spanish origin, and a cross of the lighter-colored European cattle and the all-purpose cow found in the Humid Crescent of northern Iberia, with the wild or semi-wild black, dark red and dark brown descendants of the Iberian breed.

The result was a hardy cow that handled itself well in the wilderness. The breed is heat-tolerant, long-lived, resistant to parasites and diseases and productive on low quality forage native to the grasslands and swamps.

The typical Cracker cow weighs around 600-800 pounds, with bulls weighing up to around 1,200. The breed these days is not as popular, because it cannot produce the amount of meat as Brahmas and other breeds.

The Florida Cracker horse is a small horse that, like its counterpart cow, weighs less than other traditional breeds. The horse’s ancestry is traced back to the horses brought to Florida by the Spanish, and it shares the genetic heritage of the Iberian horse. It is similar to the Spanish Mustang.

The breed has been called by several names: Chickasaw pony, Seminole pony, Florida horse, Florida cow pony, Marsh Tackie and many others.

After the Spaniards introduced the cattle and horses, ranching became a viable industry in Florida. According to the museum, cattle hides and tallow were major exports to Cuba and other destinations for hundreds of years. The Spaniards, Seminoles and Americans were all able to use the small, agile Spanish horses to work the large herds of cattle in the state.