A high rate of on-farm cow mortality (i.e. unassisted death and euthanasia) is both a financial concern and an important animal welfare issue. The overall aim of this thesis was to evaluate the development of mortality in Swedish dairy herds and to identify characteristics associated with on-farm mortality at cow and herd levels. In paper I, two analyses were performed using data from the cattl...

This study estimated the fermentation characteristics and nutrient value of corn-lablab bean mixture silages relative to corn silages. The effects of feeding corn-lablab bean mixture silages on nutrient apparent digestibility and milk production of dairy cows in northern China were also investigated. Three ruminally cannulated Holstein cows were used to determine the ruminal digestion kinetics ...

The aim of this study was to investigate effects of DGAT1, OPN and PPARGC1A candidate genes on milk production traits in Iranian Holstein cattle. Several papers have studied single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and their association with economic traits in dairy cows, but the combined effect of these genes has not been examined in Iranian Holstein cattle population. Blood samples were collect...

The objective of this field study was to compare the udder health status as well as the clinical mastitis rate during the first 100 d of lactation in cows that received long-acting dry cow antibiotic alone (group AB) or in combination with an internal teat sealant (group AB + OS). The study was conducted during a 9-month period and included 136 Holstein cows from 12 dairy farms in Hessia, Germa...

To analyze the effects of some environmental factors such as herd, year, season of calving, stage of lactation on mastitis incidence, a total of 101147 monthly test day somatic cell counts collected from 13977 Iranian Holstein heifers calved between 2002 and 2006 in 183 herds were used. The event of mastitis in cows was coded as 1 if their somatic cell count at specific test day was greater tha...

productive and reproductive traits have great importance in international dairy cattle breeding objectives. production, reproduction (days open and calving interval) and pedigree data of iranian holstein dairy cattles were collected between 2002 and 2012 from 47 herds in isfahan province. the data set consisted of 30179 records from 18837 registered iranianholstein dairy cattles. single trait r...

the objective of this study was to evaluate the importance of environmental and genetic factors affecting semen quality; sperm volume (sv), sperm concentration (spco), total sperm (ts), fresh sperm motility (fsm), total fresh motile sperm (tfms), post thaw sperm motility (ptsm), total post thaw motile sperm (tptms), number of produced payout (npp), number of fresh motile sperm in each milt ejac...

The herd dynamic milk (HDM) model is a dynamic model capable of simulating the performance of individual dairy animals (from birth to death), with a daily time step. Within this study, the HDM model is described and evaluated in relation to milk production, body condition score (BCS) and BCS change throughout lactation by comparing model simulations against data from published experimental stud...

Insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1) has been shown to be associated with fertility, growth, and development in cattle. The aim of this study was to (1) identify novel single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in the bovine IGF-1 gene and alongside previously identified SNPs (2) determine their association with traits of economic importance in Holstein-Friesian dairy cattle. Nine novel SNPs were i...

Vitamin B-12 (also called cobalamin) is essential for human health and current intake levels of vitamin B-12 are considered to be too low. Natural enrichment of the vitamin B-12 content in milk, an important dietary source of vitamin B-12, may help to increase vitamin B-12 intake. Natural enrichment of the milk vitamin B-12 content could be achieved through genetic selection, provided there is ...