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Nordic genetic evaluation of dairy cattle for sustainability and competitiveness

Nordic Evaluations Nordic genet

Genetic improvement of dairy cattle has made a significant contribution to the increase in agricultural food production during the last century. Since decades last edge scientific research has been utilized successfully by the Finnish dairy cattle breeding organization FABA as well as by alike organizations in the other Nordic counties. In 2002 Danish, Finnish and Swedish dairy cattle breeding organizations joined to coordinate and enable best possible research and development activities for the genetic improvement of Nordic dairy cattle. By now a common genetic evaluations for Nordic dairy cattle has been developed for which Luke together with other Nordic research partners have made significant scientific contributions. Keeping the Nordic dairy breeds competitive and strengthen the sustainability of milk production requires to find those breeding candidates, which inherit best available genetics to meet these challenges. Additional to the importance of production traits, health traits and traits for resource efficiency will gain importance in the future selection of dairy cattle. Research in this project will focus on developing state of the art genetic evaluations for fertility traits as well as the development of genetic evaluations for new traits that describe resource efficiency. During the first two years of the project research will be targeted to the development of a new Nordic genetic evaluation for fertility traits in heifers and dairy cows. The new evaluation should utilize all available phenotype and pedigree information across the Nordic countries to allow prediction of fertility breeding values not only for bulls but also for cows. Developed prediction models shall allow providing necessary information for future improvement of genomic selection for fertility traits.