Data Driven Breeding of Resource Efficient Cattle

Offentlig prosjektsammendrag

Animal breeding programs are constantly improving due to the development of a new technology. This new technology is coming from the improvements in the prediction of breeding values, phenotype recording or reproduction technology. When introducing the new technological improvements into the breeding program a good estimation of their effect on genetic gain is often missing. Due to a time and irreversibility of the process it is not possible to make such an estimation on a real population. Recent developments and drop of running cost for supercomputers have made computer simulations possible for animal breeding programs as well. Computer simulations offer a cheap and very accurate approximation of real breeding programs. This gives us a great potential for improvements in the future developments of Norwegian Red cattle breeding program. In this project we will develop an in-silico modelling system of Norwegian Red cattle breeding program. We will test the application of this system on the phenotyping for feed efficiency which is one of the new traits we are going to phenotype in the future. The results of this project will be used in two different places. Firstly, we will use the developed in-silico breeding program as a basis for testing of future changes in the Norwegian Red breeding program and secondly, the best scenario for recording of feed intake will be implemented in the recording of the feed intake for the Norwegian Red cattle.