genetic-bulls-inbreeding-10.html
VikingNews Global 2-2019
11 / 28
chance to become the sires of the next generation. we also use a few foreign
bulls
. genomic testing of all animals in a herd is done on many herds today, which certainly contributes to vikinggenetics finding good
bulls
in many of these herds. this high degree of variation in the
bulls
? pedigree is the first indicator that we have
inbreeding
under control.
inbreeding
control to control the balance between genetic progress and
inbreeding
, vikinggenetics uses an optimisation
programme
called eva (evolutionary algorithm). the results from the
programme
are includ- ed in the total evaluation both when it comes to selecting females for the embryo transfer
programme
and when purchasing the next generation of
bulls
. it is a very useful
programme
that is also used in the breeding
programme
s for pigs, elks and fish. one of the results from the eva
programme
shows
inbreeding
in the population. figure 2 shows the degree of
inbreeding
measured in a dataset consisting of high index animals in the vikinggenetics area. according to the food & agricultural organisation (fao), a population is sustainable if
inbreeding
increases by less than 1% unit per generation. in practice, this means ap- prox. 0.4 percentage point based on the 819-day generation interval shown above. in vikingholstein, we have the luxury of being able to use the local female population actively to create long term genetic variation along with optimal genetic progress. this is due to both a very strong market share and the fact that vikinggenetics is the only company selecting for ntm. at the same time, this is also a great responsibility that we take seriously as the numbers also show. 3,000 2,500 1,500 500 0 1,000 2,000 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 females males average figure 1: change in age of parents measured in days from 2009 to 2017 for vikingholstein
bulls
. figure 2: the annual degree of
inbreeding
for vikingholstein measured on high index females in the viking-genetics region. 3.6 3.8 4.0 4.2 4.4 4.6 4.8 4.8 5.0 5.2 5.4 5.5 4.3 2006 6 5 4 3 2 1 0 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 11 november 2019 | vikingnews 11 november 20 19 | vikingnews
climate-carbon-dairy-12.html