Browsing by Subject "dairy cattle breeding"

Dairy cattle breeding has been driven by economics since the 1930s. For a longer period, the costeffectiveness of dairy farming has been poor, and the farmers have been forced to look for all possible ways to improve economics, through either reducing costs or increasing profit. Finland had in 2018 6250 dairy farms, which all differ from each other by size, economics and production environment. Finland participates to Nordic Cattle Genetic Evaluation (NAV) and uses Nordic Total Merit (NTM) as a joint total merit index for Finland, Denmark and Sweden. It has not been published, whether Finnish dairy farms would need more farm specific total merit indices. Breeding goal preferences do differ not only between farms but also between production types, since organic farmers tend to put more emphasis on production, compared to conventional. The aim of this study was to study whether economic values on breeding goal traits differ between farms and production types. Herd specific economic values were counted for ten breeding goal traits. The study was fulfilled with seven dairy herds, who differed from each other by herd size and production environment. Two of the herds were organic. The calculation of economic values was based on a bioeconomic model SimHerd. It is a stochastic simulation model, which simulates the herd in weekly steps, taking all events in a cow’s life into account. Traits analyzed in this study were chosen according to hypotheses of their economic values. Traits analyzed were ECM yield, mastitis, conception rate of cows, conception rate of heifers, cow mortality, calf mortality, claw and leg diseases, feed efficiency, body weight and other culling. Prices and variable costs as well as the phenotypic data of the farms was collected from the year 2018. Finnish milk production is highly dependent of subsidies, but due to their complexity, only direct subsidies for milk were considered in this study. Relations between traits were cut off from the model before simulation. The maximum number of cows for each farm was set to 1000 to improve the reliability of the simulations. Each trait was simulated three times: with the phenotypic data and then twice with changing the parameter. According to the results, the relative economic value of ECM yield was the highest for all farms. The highest economic values differ between farms, but on average the next highest economic values were for body weight, conception rate of cows and cow mortality. These economic values were in the same range for both conventional and organic farms. When relative economic values are presented as percentages of the sum of standardized economic values, traits affecting longevity cover together the greatest percentage. With improved longevity the cows have more productive years, which means greater lifetime milk yield, less replacement cots and smaller environmental impact. When results were compared between farms, they showed no need for farm specific TMI. A different TMI for organic production would need a further research.