Interbull Routine Genetic Evaluation for Calving Traits
April 2014
Introduction
The latest routine international evaluation for calving traits took place as
scheduled at the Interbull Centre. Data from sixteen (16) countries were
included in this evaluation.
International genetic evaluations for calving traits of
bulls from Australia, Austria-Germany, Belgium, Canada, Denmark-Finland-Sweden,
France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Netherlands, Norway,
Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America were computed.
Brown Swiss, Holstein, and Red Dairy Cattle breed data were included in this
evaluation.
Changes in national procedures
Changes in the national genetic evaluation of calving traits are as
follows:
| AUS | HOL | Changed our genetic base by moving one year ahead. the base constitutes of bulls born between 2000 and 2004 |
| IRL | RDC | Participates with dce for the first time in a routine run. |
| ITA | HOL | Currently, cows calving before January 1998 are deleted.Base change |
| NOR | RDC | Bulls are modeled by sire of calf and sire of cow as correlated traits. Results are transformed to direct and maternal effect. The oldest bulls have only sire of cow data and the youngest have only sire of calf data. This create some instability among the oldest bulls and among the youngest bulls. |
INTERBULL CHANGES COMPARED TO THE DECEMBER ROUTINE RUN
| 1) | Data submission for pedigree, EBV/PTA, and parameters is possible only through uploading of the data to the Interbull Data Exchange Area (IDEA); | |
| 2) | Interbull Centre has moved to a completely new MACE evaluation software called "Dairy System for International Evaluation (DAISIE)", partly because of the extended use of IDEA for EBV/PTA, and partly because of our continuous efforts to make the system more effective than before; | |
| 3) | All trait groups (including conformation traits) are now evaluated in-house. | |
| 4) | The file containing heritability values now contain more decimal places for heritability, and one extra field for the definition of reference base population; | |
| 5) | The file containing genetic correlations has changed name from rG_columns_all to cor{RUNID}.csv, and also contains one extra field for the number of common bulls; | |
| 6) | The file containing sire genetic standard deviations has changed name from sire_std_columns_all to std{RUNID}.csv; | |
| 7) | Sire-MGS based pedigree files are not distributed anymore; | |
| 8) | Parent averages in the "ipa" format are not distributed anymore; | |
| 9) | An import AI bull (type of proof = 21) with official publication status 'Y' from a given country is included in the distribution file if the bull has a first country proof included from a different country OR a second country proof is included with minimum required number of daughters or EDC (20, 10, 150, 20, 20, and 80) and herds (20, 10, 150, 20, 20, and 80) for different breeds (BSW, GUE, HOL, JER, RDC and SIM), respectively; | |
| 10) | Bulls with some missing pedigree information (sires and/or dam and/or birthdate) are excluded from evaluations; | |
| 11) | Standardization factors are not used anymore; | |
| 12) | Post-processing of genetic correlation are now applied to all trait groups. |
Data and method of analysis
Data were national genetic evaluations of AI
sampled bulls with at least 10 daughters or 10 EDC (for clinical mastitis and
maternal calving traits at least 50 daughters or 50 EDC, and for direct calving
traits at least 50 calvings or 50 EDC) in at least 10 herds. Table 1 presents
the amount of data included in this Interbull evaluation for all breeds.
National proofs were first de-regressed within country and
then analysed jointly with a linear model including the effects of evaluation
country, genetic group of bull and bull merit. Heritability estimates used in
both the de-regression and international evaluation were as in each country's
national evaluation.
Estimated genetic parameters and sire standard deviations are shown in APPENDIX I
and the corresponding number of common bulls are listed in APPENDIX
II.
Scientific literature
The international genetic evaluation procedure is based on international work described
in the following scientific publications:
International genetic evaluation computation:
Schaeffer. 1994. J. Dairy Sci. 77:2671-2678
Klei, 1998. Interbull Bulletin 17:3-7
Verification and Genetic trend validation:
Klei et al., 2002. Interbull Bulletin 29:178-182.
Boichard et al., 1995. J. Dairy Sci. 78:431-437
Weighting factors:
Fikse and Banos, 2001. J. Dairy Sci. 84:1759-1767
De-regression:
Sigurdsson and G. Banos. 1995. Acta Agric. Scand. 45:207-219
Jairath et al. 1998. J. Dairy Sci. Vol. 81:550-562
Genetic parameter estimation:
Klei and Weigel, 1998, Interbull Bulletin 17:8-14
Sullivan, 1999. Interbull Bulletin 22:146-148
Post-processing of estimated genetic correlations:
Mark et al., 2003, Interbull Bulletin 30:126-135
Jorjani et al., 2003. J. Dairy Sci. 86:677-679
https://wiki.interbull.org/public/rG%20procedure?action=print
Time edits
Weigel and Banos. 1997. J. Dairy Sci. 80:3425-3430
International reliability estimation
Harris and Johnson. 1998. Interbull Bulletin 17:31-36
Next routine international evaluation
The next routine evaluation of Interbull for production, conformation, udder
health, longevity, calving, female fertility and workability traits is scheduled
for August 2014.
Deadline for sending data to the Interbull Centre is Tuesday August 22, 2014,
17:00 CET; confidential distribution of results is targeted for Thursday July
31, 2014, with earliest possible official release of results on August 12, 2014.
Please remark the three week turn around time.
Next test international evaluation
The next test run for production, conformation,
udder health, longevity, calving, female fertility and workability traits will
take place in September 2014.
Countries planning to introduce changes in their national evaluation procedures
and wishing to have them included in the routine Interbull evaluation, should
have their data examined in this test run.
New data and validation results should be sent to the Interbull Centre no later
than September 2, 2014, 17:00 CET.
PUBLICATION OF INTERBULL TEST RUN
Test evaluation results are meant for review purposes only and should not be
published.