GENETIC AND NON-GENETIC PARAMETER ESTIMATION FOR PRODUCTIVE AND REPRODUCTIVE PERFORMANCES OF CROSSBRED DAIRY CATTLE AT HOLETTA RESEARCH CENTER

Abstract:

This study was initiated to evaluate the productive and reproductive performances of crossbred dairy cattle at Holetta research center dairy farm. Overall, 19,454 crossbred dairy cattle performance records were used for the study. Non-genetic and genetic analysis on the performance of crossbred dairy cattle were applied for estimation. The GLM and regression analysis procedure of SAS 2004 software was employed to determine the fixed and crossbreeding effects of year, season, parity and genetic group (additive, heterosis and recombination effects). On the other hand, WOMBAT, which is a software package for quantitative genetic analyses of continuous traits, fitting a linear, mixed model; estimates of covariance components and the resulting genetic parameters were employed and obtained. From these analyses, the performance of dairy cattle was influenced by genetic and non-genetic factors.