Founded in 1948, today the cooperative unites 1,300 cattle breeders in the Jura which have entrusted it with:
- the artificial insemination of their heifers and cows,
- the selection of the Montbeliard breed.

A bord of 21 breeders manages the company which has 45 members of staff. A cooperative of a human scale, Jura-Bétail strives to be permanently available to its members whilst being attentive to the national and international development perspectives.
Four breeding professions are in operation.

Eighty thousand artificial inseminations are carried out every year by a team of twenty insemination technicians. The cooperative 's savoir-faire resulted in the Ministry of Agriculture officially entrusting the cooperative with this mission in 1971..
Further services are offered to breeders:
- synchronisation of heat periods,
- gestation reports,
- reasonable coupling schedules,
- ...
The embryonic transplant which annually concerns about 60 to 80 females is carried out by a specialised operator.
The insemination centre in the Jura is the most unvarying: 95% of inseminations use semen from Montbeliard bulls.

Very early on, Jura breeders realised that the insemination technique was not only a reproduction tool, it was also a means of improving their herd. The first union of Montbeliard testing was born in Jura in 1952, following the instigation of the cooperative .
From that time forward, the selection unit has been constantly working to improve the natural qualities of the Montbeliard breed. The selection programme was officially recognised in 1975.
Today, the programme running is entrusted to a team of specialised technicians (parent couplings, purcahsing males, etc.) accompanied by experienced and motivated breeders (choice of bull fathers, visit to bull mothers and selection of testing candidates,...).

The Crançot site permanently houses a hundred or so bulls bought by the cooperative mainly in the Jura and Western France. 40% of these are kept from the age of 10 months to check their descendants. An strict individual food control is applied during this breeding phase (INRA protocol).
The bull herd has a total of 160 reproducing heads aged between 1 and 6 years old. The semen production laboratory permanently supplies a stock of 8 million paillettes.
Every year, the best 40 young bulls tested are entered into the catalogue 0f which 20,000 issues are printed for France and overseas and which provides breeders, wherever they are in the world, access to a high-level of Montbeliard breed genetics.

The accumulation of successive Jura-Bétail bull selection programmes means that Jura breeders are permanently positioned in the top few of the breeding lists published by the Montbeliard UPRA and in specialist reviews and magazines.
It is no exaggeration to say that without the work of Jura-Bétail, the Monbeliard breed would not be where it is today.

This fourth area of activity is today entrusted to the subsidiary "Montbéliarde du Jura SA" which brings together the main partners of cattle breeding in the Jura.
Every year, 1,500 Montbeliard heifers and cows leave the Jura for another destination in France (Brittany, South Wast, Massif Central,...) or overseas.
Buyers and sellers enjoy doing business with Montbeliard specialists.