All Breed Access: Some Milking Shorthorns have other breeds in their pedigree. Is this common, and what is the future of this genetic expansion?

Ryan Barrett: For the past twenty years or more, Milking Shorthorn herdbooks around the world have been open to the use of other red breeds to help modernize and improve the Milking Shorthorn breed while retaining many of the qualities that make Milking Shorthorns an efficient dairy alternative.

There has been selected use of Red Holstein, Swedish Red, and Norwegian Red, as well as use of the Australian Illawarra, which are essentially Milking Shorthorns with some recent Red Holstein influence. This has helped to increase milk volumes and improve the dairy character of the breed, as well as making dramatic improvements to udder conformation. However, the breed has been able to largely retain many of the characteristics that make the breed in demand now - a problem-free cow. Having a herdbook which is accepting of other breed ancestry allows for ease of recordation of crossbreds, and also allows a small breed to maintain low inbreeding percentages while increasing genetic merit. Despite having a small population, the Milking Shorthorn population in Canada has the lowest average inbreeding percentage of all breeds. Most Milking Shorthorns in Canada are greater than 80% purity, with AI sires ranging from 75% purity to 100%. The American population also maintains a Native herdbook status,
identifying Shorthorns that trace 100% to the Coate”’’s herdbook.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 2nd, 2007 at 9:19 am by sschmidt and is filed under Guest Blogger Series. 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.