Holstein World: What is important when breeding for more durable, more long-lived, and more profitable cows today?

Marj & Dick: What our customers and industry want really hasn’t changed – dairies want cows to have it all – high production, good reproduction, durability, few health problems, easy calving, good udders, sound feel and legs, and longevity. However, as we have seen, we are in a new era and a key for the future is to understand and adapt to the changes.

Clearly, production traits will continue to be important in breeding for more profitable cows. In addition, we need more emphasis on traits that are associated with efficiencies and reducing dairy farm costs - traits like longevity, female fertility, calving related traits include reducing stillbirths, and mastitis resistance. The trend for increasing emphasis on health, management, fitness, and longevity traits and correspondingly lesser emphasis on production traits is evident when studying changes in TPI, for example, and comparable national indexes from many other countries around the world. Today, production traits account for only 50% of the relative emphasis in TPI while traits like longevity, health, fitness, and management traits account for the remaining 50%.

So, what is most important for longevity? According to USDA-Animal Improvement Programs Laboratory (2006) research, factors most important for longevity are cows’ abilities to:

1) Breed back – positive for Daughter Pregnancy Rate (DPR)
2) Calve easily with a live calf – favorable Sire and Daughter Calving Ease, and lower values for Sire and Daughter Stillbirths
3) Avoid mastitis – lower Somatic Cell Score (SCS) and positive for Udder Composite

Now there are more and better genetic ‘tools’ (PL, DPR, SCS, Stillbirths, and Daughter Calving Ease) to aid our selection decision-making and by using these new tools to select sires for greater female fertility (DPR), Udder Composite/more shallow Udder Depth, longevity (PL), and mastitis resistance (SCS), and less Dairy Form (carries more Body Condition), calving difficulty (lower % Difficult Births), and fewer stillbirths we will be working to breed for more durable, more long-lived, and more profitable cows.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 14th, 2007 at 9:08 am by sschmidt and is filed under Guest Blogger Series. Hits for this post:1370 You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.