When you join the American Angus Association (AAA), you become a part of the world’s largest single beef breed organization in the world.

Your membership with AAA allows you to register Angus cattle, participate in Association programs and in decision making processes. All new members have access to the Breeders Reference Guide on the website or can receive an updated copy by contacting the Member Services Department at (816) 383-5100.

If you are interested in receiving the Angus Journal, an invaluable tool for every Angus breeder, please be sure to indicate your subscription on your membership application. Junior members will automatically receive two youth oriented issues of the Angus Journal (full subscriptions may be purchased at an additional cost).

If at any time we can be of assistance, please contact us. We look forward to having you as a member of the AAA.

In view of its status as a non-profit institution and its desire to maximize the direct impact from its research funding dollars, it is the official policy of the American Angus Association and its entities not to pay facility, administrative or other indirect costs for research projects funded by the Association and its 501(c) 3 not-for-profit entity Angus Foundation.

When George Grant transported four Angus bulls from Scotland to the middle of the Kansas Prairie in 1873, they were part of the Scotsman's dream to found a colony of wealthy, stock-raising Britishers. Grant died five years later, and many of the settlers at his Victoria, Kansas, colony later returned to their homeland. However, these four Angus bulls, probably from the herd of George Brown of Westertown, Fochabers, Scotland, made a lasting impression on the U.S. cattle industry.

When two of the George Grant bulls were exhibited in the fall of 1873 at the Kansas City (Missouri) Livestock Exposition, some considered them "freaks" because of their polled (naturally hornless) heads and solid black color (Shorthorns were then the dominant breed.) Grant, a forward thinker, crossed the bulls with native Texas longhorn cows, producing a large number of hornless black calves that survived well on the winter range. The Angus crosses wintered better and weighed more the next spring, the first demonstration of the breed's value in their new homeland.

The first great herds of Angus beef cattle in America were built up by purchasing stock directly from Scotland. Twelve hundred cattle alone were imported, mostly to the Midwest, in a period of explosive growth between 1878 and 1883. Over the next quarter of a century these early owners, in turn, helped start other herds by breeding, showing, and selling their registered stock.

The American Aberdeen-Angus Breeders' Association (name shortened in 1950s to American Angus Association) was founded in Chicago, Illinois, on November 21, 1883, with 60 members. The growth of the Association has paralleled the success of the Angus breed in America.

In the first century of operation, more than 10 million head were recorded. The Association records more cattle each year then any other beef breed association, making it the largest beef breed registry association in the world.