Economic weights have been estimated in two breeds (Latxa and Manchega) using economic and technical data collected in 41 Latxa and 12 Manchega dairy sheep flocks. The traits considered were fertility (lambing per year), prolificacy (number of lambs), milk yield (litres) and longevity (as productive life, in years). A linear function was used, relating these traits to the different costs in the...

Market failures are the main cause of poor acknowledgement of the true impact of functional sheep traits on the management and economic performance of farms, which results in their omission from the breeding goal or the estimation of non-representative economic weights in the breeding goal. Consequently, stated-preference non-market valuation techniques, which recently emerged to mitigate these...

Inheritance of economic traits was studied in Nili-Ravi dairy buffaloes through analysis of data comprising 5037 records of daughters of 79 sires. Data were collected from three large-sized state dairy farms. Heritability, genetic and phenotypic correlations of some indicator traits on important production and reproduction traits were worked out. Based upon analysis of records for first lactati...

Heritabilities (ĥ2) and genetic correlations (rG) were estimated by regression of offspring on sire in two replicate, unselected lines of mice. Traits were associated with growth, feed efficiency, fat deposition and lean tissue. The ĥ2 for growth traits ranged from .34 to .42, except for 3-wk body weight, which was only .05. The ĥ2 for feed efficiency was .28. Ranges in ĥ2 were .45 to .50 for f...

To identify genetic markers associated with economic traits in pigs, 157 microsatellite markers were examined in Yorkshire pigs. Thirty eight female Yorkshire pigs were initially examined and six of them were selected as progenitors; half were more than 1.5 standard deviations (SD) above the mean for average daily gain (ADG) and backfat thickness (BFT), and the remaining half were more than 1.5...

Diameter at breast height (DBH), wood density (DEN) and predicted modulus of elasticity (PME) are considered as 'key traits' (KT) in the improvement in radiata pine breeding programmes in New Zealand. Any other traits which are also of interest to radiata pine breeders and forest growers are called 'non-key traits' (NKTs). External resin bleeding (ERB), internal checking (IC), number of heartwo...

Recent investigations indicate that personality traits are unevenly distributed geographically, with some traits being more prevalent in certain places than in others. The geographical distributions of personality traits are associated with a range of important political, economic, social, and health outcomes. The majority of research on this subject has focused on the geographical distribution...

We first sought to clarify the effects of discounted rate, survival rate, and lactation persistency as a component trait of the selection index on net merit, defined as the first five lactation milks and herd life (HL) weighted by 1 and 0.389 (currently used in Japan), respectively, in units of genetic standard deviation. Survival rate increased the relative economic importance of later lactati...

Introduction There are several methods to manage corn rootworms, including crop rotation, rootworm insecticides, and corn rootworm (CRW) transgenic traits. The use of CRW transgenic traits in corn hybrids has allowed farmers to manage CRW without using soil-applied insecticides. However, rootworm populations resistant to the transgenic traits have been confirmed in Iowa, leading some farmers to...