Developing more sustainable dairy cattle breeding goals based on the integration of genomics and precision technologies

Why this research is being done

As animal welfare and resilience is a multidimensional concept comprising physical, behavioral, physiological, and emotional aspects, it requires longitudinal measurements. Precision Livestock Farming is a great source of data for deriving novel indicators of welfare and resilience for breeding purposes. In the case of dairy cattle, such data sources include automated milking systems (milking robots), automated milk feeders, rumination and activity monitors, cameras, and others. To identify novel traits related to dairy cattle behavior, welfare, and resilience based on automatically-recorded data in precision dairy farms and investigate their genetic background.

Results

There are various results that could be highlighted as part of this program. Some examples are:

  1. We analyzed feeding records from automatic milk feeding machines to evaluate the genetic background of milk feeding traits and bovine respiratory disease (BRD) in North American Holstein calves. We observed that all the traits derived are heritable and can be used for selecting animals with improved health outcomes and performance later in their lives.
  2. The number of dairy farms adopting automatic milking systems (AMS) has considerably increased around the world aiming to reduce labor costs, improve cow welfare, increase overall performance, and generate a large amount of daily data, including production, behavior, health, and milk quality records. In this context, we estimated genetic parameters for milkability traits and novel behavioral indicators based on AMS-derived data. All the milkability traits evaluated were found to be heritable and have demonstrated selective potential, suggesting that their use in dairy cattle breeding programs can improve dairy production efficiency in AMS.
Conclusions

Dairy breeding programs can refine their selection indexes by adding novel traits derived from precision technologies. Our group has derived more than 20 novel traits that can now be used by breeding programs for improving dairy cattle welfare, resilience, and productive efficiency.

Contact information

Luiz Brito britol@purdue.edu | 765 494 6088 | Google Scholar