| Fertilty in the Guernsey Breed |
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| Friday, 26 March 2010 13:29 | |
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EGCS President Chris Watson placed this comment in "another place" and has not surprizingly received any replies, with the FOB meeting tasking place next month on Guernsey Island it may be helpful if any one would like to comment. "Rob of cause you are right, but not everyone agrees that GMI is the major cause AND sights individual bulls that have let us down. They forget all the ones that they are thriving on.
The GGBP Committee would like to know all peoples opinions." A report done by the SAC on fertility in Guernseys by Eileen Wall concluded that there had been no significant deteroriation in the Guernsey figures as based on her research of NMR calving data. This report was available on the WGCF site until the recent update of that site and presumably can still be obtained from the WGCF secretary Bill Luff. The fertility Indexes published by Dairy Co have a range of -14 to +14 and each point represents half a day, so a daughter of a bull that is -14 will be expected to take 7 days longer to settle back in calf. These daughters are also generally higher yeilding. The tables of Guernsey bulls from Dairy Co can be ranked for Fertility by clicking on the table heading and i doubt that there is a bull that is + for Fertility that any breeder would use. The Fertility index at present is only calculated on sire daughter information and doesn't seem to take into account the female family contribution, which is understandble given that there is far less data available for any cow family. There are of course many other variables that impact on cow fertility and in my opinion the current concerns over Fertility are overstated.
Comments (3)
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Saturday, 27 March 2010 07:04
colin gleed
At the South - East AGM it was decided that a fertility index should be shown as a seperate table and NOT in the GMI
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Saturday, 27 March 2010 11:06
Rob Maiklem
There are many factors affecting fertility, most farms are working at lower staffing levels than ever before, this combined with ever increasing expectations of milk yeild from our cows is probably the major reason for the slip in calving index. Calving index is only 2% heritable in comparison to yeild traits which are over 30% heritable and this only applies to proven bulls, a fertility index for young bulls would be a complete waste of time as it would be so unreliable. (most GU bulls available are unproven!)This would result in young bulls not being used due to a less than 2% heritable trait that we have guessed! For this reason I do not think that fertility should be brought into an already over complicated index. I do feel however that it should be easily availble along side GMI,PLI,TM, Milk, Fat etc. It would be of far more benefit to have a compilation of the top sires for each trait as the other breeds do. This could easily be done by a simple table of available bulls with each trait having a "sort" button to put the list in order of that trait, or have an application similar to the holstein bull selecter on the HUK sight, on this application you put in the traits important to you and it produces a list of the bulls suited to your needs.
Comments (1)
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Saturday, 27 March 2010 15:15
Digby Gribble
Having recommended the CDI site, I thought I should check it out and am glad I did, with the recent redesign of that site(which I like)the default is now to Holstein bulls only, but there is still a way in follow this link
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