Project description:
The purpose of the project is to ensure that the farmer can choose the right combination of race when crossbreeding the livestock. This is done by following up on the substantial amount of crossbreeding data, created by the increased use of systematic crossbreeding programmes. The amount of new data makes it possible to calculate more solid estimates for the crossbreeding richness. This is important for the future possibility of delivering the best advice in the area to the Danish dairy cattle farmers. Danish cattle farmers will have to know the size of the crossbreeding richnesses – in both first time crossbreedings, three-race crossbreedings and reverse crossbreedings – to be able to take the right decisions. Until now we have mainly shown comparisons within herds. Now we have the data that makes us able to perform advanced analyses, which take both the so-called dominans effects and epistasis effects into consideration. As a result, we will be much better in assessing 1) the consequences of different choices of race and 2) the size of the crossbreeding richness in crossbreds further ahead in the systematic programmes. However, good estimates for both race differences and crossbreeding richness for feed efficiency are missing. We will therefore test both purebred and crossbred animals for feed efficiency at DKC. The project will be coordinated with the DairyCross project, which recently received funding from GUDP.
