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VikingNews UK 03 2015
10 / 24
cow like a dream
genomic
selection has changed the breeding u nelma (miqur x johde) is worthy of her name. unelma translated to english means a dream. she has calved eight times, milked over 92,000 kg and is still stylish. best lactation has been 13,051 kg milk. unelma was shown in finnish national show farmari in joensuu in july. the cow is owned by the agricultural unit of ylä-savo vocational college. s ince the introduction of genomic selection in the vi- kingred breeding program we have seen many changes. the farmers have chosen ?genomic? bulls
instead of daughter proven bulls, and the genetic
trend has increased significantly. now we can also notice that pedigrees of the bulls are considerably larger than before the genomic era. increased genetic trend in figure 1 you can see the genetic trend for vikingred in ntm for males (blue) and heifers (red). since the introduc- tion of genomic selection, the slope of the trend curve is steeper. this is most pronounced for males, but we can al- ready now see improvement of the curve for heifers who will reach the same level as the mean for ai-bulls after 3-5 years. more genomic bulls are used less than 10% of the vikingred services in 2015 have been with daughter proven sires. before the introduction of genomic selection, 70% of the inseminations were done with these older sires. the major force in this change is that the younger genomic bulls are superior and have a higher genetic level on all traits in ntm. more diversified pedigrees the reliability of genomic proofs is lower compared with prog- eny testing. therefore more bulls need to be used and with dif- ferent pedigrees as well. in may 10 new bulls entered the breeding program and an additional 8 new bulls were selected as sires of sons. in total 18 new bulls became available to farm- ers. these 18 bulls had 16 different sires, 9 different maternal grand sires and 12 different paternal grand sires. all new ai-bulls in the vikinggenetics breeding programs have the potential of becoming a sire of sons. but not all bulls will be replaced by a son and some bulls will get several sons. for vikinggenetics it is important to ensure large genetic vari- ation to ensure future success in the breeding program. unelma (miqur x johde) from the ylä-savo vocational agricultural college was shown in the finnish national show farmari in july. she has calved eight times and produced over 92,000 kg milk. figure 1 genetic trend in ntm for vikingred. 10 vikingnews | september 2015
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