The influences of cage design features, including feeder design and space, cage depth, cage area, stocking density, and the placement of resources, on production parameters of White Leghorns have not been fully assessed under commercial conditions. Assessing all these variables in a traditional experimental study would be difficult. An epidemiological approach, using variability in cage design ...

Feed efficiency is a paramount factor for livestock economy. Previous studies had indicated a substantial heritability of several feed efficiency traits. In our study, we investigated the genetic background of residual feed intake, a commonly used parameter of feed efficiency, in a cattle resource population generated from crossing dairy and beef cattle. Starting from a whole genome association...

The feed resource for animals is a major cost determinant for profitability in livestock production enterprises, and thus any effort at improving the efficiency of feed use will help to reduce feed cost. Feed conversion ratio, expressed as feed inputs per unit output, is a traditional measure of efficiency that has significant phenotypic and genetic correlations with feed intake and growth trai...

Gut microbiota plays fundamental roles in energy harvest, nutrient digestion, and intestinal health, especially in processing indigestible components of polysaccharides in diet. Unraveling the microbial taxa and functional capacity of gut microbiome associated with feed efficiency can provide important knowledge to improve pig feed efficiency in swine industry. In the current research, we studi...

Feed efficiency, as defined by the fraction of feed energy captured in products, has more than doubled for the US dairy industry in the past 100 years. This increased feed efficiency resulted from increased milk production per cow achieved through genetics, nutrition, and management with the desired goal being greater profitability. With increased milk production per cow, more feed is consumed ...

Improvement of feed efficiency in pigs has been achieved essentially by increasing lean growth rate, which resulted in lower feed intake (FI). The objective was to evaluate the impact of strategies for improving feed efficiency on the dynamics of FI and growth in growing pigs to revisit nutrient recommendations and strategies for feed efficiency improvement. In 2010, three BWs, at 35±2, 63±9 an...

________________________________________________________________________________ Abstract Feed efficiency is of major economic importance in beef production. The objective of this work was to evaluate alternative measures of feed efficiency for use in genetic evaluation. To meet this objective, genetic parameters were estimated for the components of efficiency. These parameters were then used i...

The efficiency of feed use is an important factor influencing costs of production. However, feed intake (FI) is generally difficult and costly to measure. In addition, feed intake per se is relatively meaningless unless taken in the context of prevailing environmental and physiological processes. For example, FI and its utilisation by animals is altered by climate, activity levels, disease and ...

and Implications Regions of the genome associated with variation in feed efficiency and dry matter intake were identified using data from 3306 Holstein cows from Europe and North America. For feed efficiency, regions that explained the most variation were located on chromosomes 18, 5, and 3. For dry matter intake, top regions were 26, 5, and 25. For both traits no one region explained more than...