The objective of this study was to investigate the effect of birth weight (BW) on future milk production and reproductive performance in Iranian Holstein cattle. Records of Holstein cows between 1967 and 2010 were obtained from the Animal Breeding Center of Iran. Birth weights within each herd were grouped into five categories based on the standard normal distribution curves (z ≤-0.8416, -0.841...

(Co)variance components for stillbirth in US Holsteins were estimated under a sire-maternal grandsire threshold model using subsets of data from the national calving ease database, which includes over 6 million calving records with associated stillbirth scores. Stillbirth was coded as a binomial trait indicating whether the calf was alive 48 h postpartum. Records were selected for calves whose ...

Breeding objectives for beef cattle in Ireland were derived and used to define selection sub-indexes. The intention of the sub-indexes was to simplify selection decisions by commercial bull and semen buyers for situations where all of the resulting progeny are slaughtered, or when some female progeny are kept as replacement breeding cows. Separate sets of economic values for calving ease and ge...

This experiment was conducted to determine the association between several risk factors which may affect culling of the Iranian Holstein cows. The data consisted of 329,772 lactation records collected by the Animal Breeding Center of Iran (2003 to 2012).The logistic regression was applied to investigate the associations between the response variable, the risk of culling, and predictor variables...