Milk yield, fat yield, and fat percentage during the first three lactations were studied using New York Holsteins that were milked twice daily over a 305-d, mature equivalent lactation. Those data were used to estimate variances from direct and maternal genetic effects, cytoplasmic effects, sire by herd interaction, and cow permanent environmental effects. Cytoplasmic line was traced to the las...

Evaluations that analyze first and later parities as correlated traits were developed separately for calving ease (CE) from over 15 million calving records of Holsteins, Brown Swiss, and Holstein-Brown Swiss crossbreds and for stillbirth (SB) from 7.4 million of the Holstein CE records. Calving ease was measured on a scale of 1 (no difficulty) to 5 (difficult birth); SB status was designated as...

Additive and dominance genetic variances were estimated for milk and fat yield in Canadian Holsteins using deriva-tivefree REML procedures. Traits were analyzed under two sire and dam models differing in assumptions on the data structure. Within herd, dam relationships were first defined to be hierarchical within sire to estimate the two genetic variances, assuming no maternal, epistatic geneti...

The standard of comparison for dairy production records is the 305-day lactation, and much research has been directed to estimating 305-day milk and fat records from incomplete or in-progress records. This study was to determine the effect of several methods of extending incomplete records on sire evaluation. Complete 305-day milk and fat records of first lactations of 73,724 daughters of 1,362...

Over the last twoto three-decade period, the beef industry has made great use of genetic selection tools to improve economically important traits. Much of that improvement is due to the implementation and use of expected progeny differences (EPD). Since beef producers are paid for their animals on the basis of weight, or in some cases by the merit of animal carcasses, most EPD reported in breed...

________________________________________________________________________________ Abstract The objectives of the study were to estimate genetic parameters for stayability in the South African Angus cattle and to compare the sire and animal threshold models. Data and pedigree information were obtained from the Integrated Registration and Genetic Information System of South Africa. Stayability was...

1.0 Introduction Over the past decade, members of the Information Retrieval Lab have designed, developed, and deployed a variety of information retrieval systems. A central theme for all of our systems was the integration of structured data and text. One of our more recent efforts, SIRE, a Scalable Information Retrieval Engine [Grossman97, Grossman98, Lundquist99] is the focus of this paper. Fo...

________________________________________________________________________________ Abstract Longevity reflects the ability of a cow to avoid being culled for low production, low fertility or illness. Longevity can be used in breeding programmes if genetic parameters are known. Various measures are used for longevity. In this study survival in each of the first three lactations was analysed. Survi...