Future Animal Improvement Programs Applied to Global Populations

In the future, breeders may apply reproductive, computational, and genomic methods to global populations nearly as easily as with national populations now. Dairy cattle breeders exchange traditional breeding values worldwide via Interbull, and new methods are outlined for exchanging either genomic evaluations or genotypes. Goals are to adapt multi-trait across country evaluation (MACE) in the short term and to merge genotypes in the long term. Genotyped young animals are rapidly replacing progeny tested bulls and phenotyped cows as sources of breeding stock. Advanced reproductive techniques to shorten generation intervals could be more profitable as the accuracy of female and young animal selection increases.