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| Saturday, 27 March 2010 11:06 | |
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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.
This is a comment on "Fertilty in the Guernsey Breed"
Comments (1)
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Saturday, 27 March 2010 14:57
Digby Gribble
Thanks to Colin and Rob, I hope the EGCS President takes note! Bull selector is available for Guernseys within the CDI pages (link below on the left), but with the limited number of proven bulls available in the UK,one has to limit the number of traits that one specifies. Unfortunately EGCS are not keeping the lists updated and so the choices are even more reduced.
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