Considering the rapid climate changes worldwide, with the purpose to reduce financial losses for dairy farmers and enable a more sustainable farming as well, there is an increasing necessity to implement breeding values for heat resistance in breeding strategies. The estimation of breeding values requires a determination of temperature-humidity index (THI) threshold value. Therefore, the object...

In this study, 400,729 Dairy Herd Improvement (DHI) records collected on 77,178 cows in 692 Midwest herds over 29 mo (January 1999 to May 2001) were used to analyze milk urea nitrogen (MUN) as collected the day of the test in 6 breeds. Records of Holsteins, Jerseys, and Brown Swiss were subjected to stepwise backward elimination analysis with a model including parity (primiparous vs. multiparou...

the main objective of this study was to estimate the genetic parameters for multi-trait evaluation of birth weight (bw), gestation length (gl) and calving difficulty (cd) in first-parity iranian holstein dairy cattle. the data included 29,950 calving records collected during 1995 to 2014 by the animal breeding and improvement center of iran. a threshold-linear sire-maternal grandsire model was ...

A total of 648 purebred Holstein and 319 backcross Holstein × Jersey dairy cattle were compared for production, reproduction, health, linear type, and growth traits. Animals were born between 2003 and 2009 and were housed in the University of Wisconsin-Madison Integrated Dairy Facility. All animals had Holstein dams; lactating dams were mated to unproven Holstein sires to produce purebred (cont...

Service-sire conception rate (SCR), a phenotypic fertility evaluation based on conventional (nonsexed) inseminations from parities 1 through 5, was implemented for the United States in August 2008. The SCR model contains the categorical fixed effects of parity for lactations 1 to 5; state-year-month of insemination group; 6 standardized milk yield groups; service number for inseminations 1 to 7...

correlation between breeding value of crude milk (cm) and energy-corrected milk (ecm) was studied based on a total of 774,013 test day records belongs to 88,456 first-parity holsteins dairy cattle calving during 1997-2009 in 165 herds (from six provinces). genetic analysis of the traits was carried out by a fixed regression test day model. in the model, effects of herd, calving year, production...

Twinning costs the dairy industry an estimated $96 million each year. Twin pregnancy occurrence in high-producing cows is primarily a result of multiple ovulations associated with low circulating concentrations progesterone due to high milk production. The present retrospective observational study aimed identify associations between (1) previous parity yield and subsequent twin birth prevalence...

Survival rates and productive herd life were examined for 13.8 million US dairy cows that calved from January 1, 1980, through March 2, 2005. Cows that left the herd for dairy purposes or were from herds that discontinued Dairy Herd Improvement testing were excluded from any calculations to prevent underestimation of population longevity. Mean lactation length for cows without subsequently reco...

Reproductive information since 1995 from the USDA national dairy database was used to calculate yearly Holstein and Jersey means for days to first breeding after calving (DFB), 70-d nonreturn rate, conception rate (CR), number of breedings per lactation (NB), interval between first and last breedings during the lactation, days to last breeding after calving (DLB), pregnancy rate (PR), calving i...