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Within the Charolais area, the leading French region for beef cattle farming, the western part of Saône-et-Loire (Burgundy, France) is one of the sub-areas where regional specialisation is the most marked. Considering the important increase in livestock since the post-war period, this publication is interested in the ways in which physical labour productivity has increased over the long period of the contemporary agricultural revolution (1950 to the present). Based on a sample of interviews conducted with retired or near-retired cattle farmers, this process was decomposed into a mix of technical levels, differentiated according to the social modalities of access to resources. Following the presentation of the general movement, an illustration, based on three archetypal trajectories, proposes a quantification of these gains in physical productivity, expressed in terms of the quantity of “live weight of meat” per worker and per year.