birth weight (bw) is the first trait recorded fllowing birth. it can influence the performance of thecow and as well impact the performance of the calf it,s duringits maturity. to investigate the effect ofa calf,s bw on the performance of holstein dairy cattle in iran, the records gathered between 1967 and2010 were obtained from the iranian animal breeding center. the data were then used to mod...

Genetic parameters for birth weights (BWT), calving ease scores observed from calves born by heifers (CEH), and calving ease scores observed from calves born by cows (CEC) were estimated using Bayesian methodology with Gibbs sampling in different threshold animal models. Data consisted of 77,458 records for calving ease scores and birth weights in Gelbvieh cattle. Gibbs samplers were used to ob...

A 3-yr study was conducted with spring-born heifers (n = 240) to determine the effects of developing heifers to either 55 or 60% of mature BW at breeding on reproduction and calf production responses. A concurrent study was also conducted with summer-born heifers (n = 146) to examine effects of breeding heifers with the mature cow herd or 1 mo earlier on reproduction and calf production variabl...

This study was conducted to estimate the additive genetic components of calf mortality in the first month of age, calving difficulty, and birth weight in Holstein dairy cows in the central regions of Iran. The records comprised 61,200 calves born between 1990 and 2011 from 60 dairy herds. Different threshold-linear models in three groups of univariate, bivariate, and multivariate models were us...

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...