The Hereford is a British breed of beef cattle originally from Herefordshire in the West Midlands of England.

[3] It was the result of selective breeding from the mid-eighteenth century by a few families in Herefordshire, beginning some decades before the noted work of Robert Bakewell.

[2] The breed reached Ireland in 1775, and a few went to Kentucky in the United States in 1817; the modern American Hereford derives from a herd established in 1840 in Albany, New York.

In the twenty-first century there are breed societies in those countries and in the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, France, Hungary, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain and Sweden in Europe; in Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay in South America; in New Zealand; and in South Africa.

[25] Equal occurrence in heifers and bulls means that dwarfism is not considered a sex-linked characteristic.