Authors
Donagh P Berry, Mike P Coffey, JE Pryce, Y De Haas, P Løvendahl, N Krattenmacher, JJ Crowley, Z Wang, D Spurlock, K Weigel, K Macdonald, Roel F Veerkamp
Publication date
2014/6/1
Journal
Journal of dairy science
Volume
97
Issue
6
Pages
3894-3905
Publisher
Elsevier
Description
Feed represents a large proportion of the variable costs in dairy production systems. The omission of feed intake measures explicitly from national dairy cow breeding objectives is predominantly due to a lack of information from which to make selection decisions. However, individual cow feed intake data are available in different countries, mostly from research or nucleus herds. None of these data sets are sufficiently large enough on their own to generate accurate genetic evaluations. In the current study, we collate data from 10 populations in 9 countries and estimate genetic parameters for dry matter intake (DMI). A total of 224,174 test-day records from 10,068 parity 1 to 5 records of 6,957 cows were available, as well as records from 1,784 growing heifers. Random regression models were fit to the lactating cow test-day records and predicted feed intake at 70 d postcalving was extracted from these fitted profiles …
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