The French dairy and suckler cattle sectors are expected to face major challenges over the next 20 years, such as a probable decline in beef consumption, an increase of heat waves, the emergence of new pathogens, constraints on environmental impact, the sensitivity of forage crops to drought, a shrinking number of farmers or volatile input costs. These changes are likely to lead to significant transformation of livestock production systems. Thus, current bovine genetic resources may not be suitable for these future systems and therefore need to be reinvestigated. Altering genetic resources being a long-term process, it is essential to think now about the objectives of cattle breeding programmes in order to meet future genetic resources needs.To this end, an interdisciplinary group of cattle experts from various fields (macroeconomics, production systems, ecology, feed production, nutrition, physiology, veterinary sciences, genetics, human and social sciences, public policies) has been set up to define scenarios for the evolution of cattle farming systems in France 20 years ahead, as well as the genetic resources fitting these changes.The expert group identified factors with the greatest potential impact on future cattle farming systems, constructed several plausible cattle farming system evolution scenarios based on the trends of these factors and determined the suitable genetic resources fitting them. Results obtained were then presented and discussed with shareholders of the bovine sector to obtain feedback on the relevance, acceptability and feasibility of these findings.This work was supported by a French government grant managed by the Agence Nationale de Recherche under the France2030 program ”ANR-22-PEAE-0003”.