General resilience in dairy cows

VAŘEKA, Jan, ZAVADILOVÁ, Ludmila and KAŠNÁ, Eva. General resilience in dairy cows. Náš chov, 2023, vol. 83(10), p. 18-21. ISSN 0027-8068.
Year2023
CathegoryPublication in specialized journals
Internal link23133.pdf
Abstract

Dairy cattle selection programmes in recent decades have been characterised by a move away from increasing production alone towards a more balanced breeding goal that incorporates traits related to the sustainability of livestock production, such as functional traits, animal welfare and production efficiency. One of the newly introduced traits is general resilience, defined as the capacity of animals to cope with short-term environmental disturbances and return rapidly to the state pertained before exposure to a disturbance. The expression of resilience is based on the fluctuance of frequently measured traits such as daily milk and milk component production, live weight, feed intake and cow activity. Our study focused on analysing the variability of daily milk yield during the first 100 days of lactation in 1,405 Holstein cows recorded in five cooperating farms. The estimate of the coefficient of heritability for the natural logarithm of the variance of daily yields, LnVar_R, was 0.26. The correlations between breeding values showed that higher variability in daily milk yield was genetically associated with higher milk and protein production but with lower protein and fat content in milk. Higher variability was also associated with poorer fertility, longevity and udder health traits (higher somatic cell score, higher incidence of clinical mastitis). Selecting more resilient dairy cows could lead to easier herd management, reduced costs due to labor and treatments, and better animal welfare, thus supporting the economics of dairy farming in the Czech Republic.