The first official breeding cooperative was established in Fischbek near Altmark in 1876. The objective was to use pure-bred sires of the black-and-white Lowland Breed to develop this breed in pure-breeding.
From then on, the number of regional breeding associations and breeding cooperatives increasingly grew to merge into bigger organizations in the years to come.
To this day, Germany has numerous powerful cow families whose foundation cows can be traced back to the very first registrations in the herdbooks of North German breeding areas.