The chapter explores the relations through the eighteenth, nineteenth and into the twentieth century between discourses and practices of animal breeding and debates on human reproduction. It reviews the shift in the 1700s to breeding farm animals for improvement, and the foundation of breed societies promoting selection by pedigree. It examines the birth of an intellectual discourse with a shared interest in pedigree data and in breeding as a cross-species field. It critically considers the view that interventions in humans have always been modelled on those developed for animals; debates on the pros and cons of inbreeding show that human reproduction was as much a resource for thinking about animal breeding as the other way round. It documents the parallel public discourses on eugenic improvement in cattle and human populations, and the involvement of the state in cattle breeding, which in Britain came relatively late. It shows that mid-twentieth century experiments with artificial insemination in dairy cattle helped create a common context for veterinarians and human fertility specialists to explore a range of new conceptive technologies. It concludes that agriculture was and remains an important realm for imagining human reproductive futures.