Pick a scheme that suits your breeding aims
Pick a scheme that suits your breeding aims
SELECTIVE breeding is an avenue for increasing profitability of dairy herds, but when selecting bulls to develop a block calving, pasture fed herd – not a traditional UK production system – available indexes should be read with caution.
Brian Wickham of the Irish Cattle Breeding Federation, said the first priority of selective breeding is to decide what you want from a cow and what trade-offs you will accept – milk yield at the expense of fertility.
"Make use of schemes that have developed breeding objectives for your type of production system. New Zealand and Irish breeding objectives are useful for pasture fed, block calving systems."
National and international indexes that rank available animals according to breeding objectives should then be consulted. However he added that the amount of information on candidate animals will vary between breed, country and semen supplier.
Mr Wickham urged producers to identify required traits that are not included in national indexes and lobby the organisations involved to provide relevant genetic evaluations.
"Producers can help by collecting data from their own herds, such as identification, ancestry, reproduction and production information for all milking cows, and sending it to national evaluation systems that collect from other herds in the country. This data can form the basis for cattle breeding decisions world-wide."
However, when evaluating breeding information for a different production system to that normally found in UK, economic and biological differences should be considered, warned Mr Wickham.
"Market returns for milk constituents vary between countries, so are given different emphasis in indexes."
In the case of biology, differing traits are recorded in countries and because management systems are becoming less consistent, bull rankings vary in different environments, such as whether they are fed high or low levels of concentrate.
Mr Wickham also urged producers to consider using crossbreds in their breeding programme because of their greater economic performance compared to purebreds, due to hybrid vigour.
"However, the superiority of crossbreds is dependent on the parent breeds maintaining high rates of genetic improvement."