Three times a year, dairy producers and breeders eagerly await new genetic evaluations on all dairy cattle in the national cooperator database.
On Tuesday, December 3, more than 87 million animals will receive updated values for 49 individual traits and four genetic selection indexes – Lifetime Net Merit $, Cheese Merit $, Fluid Merit $, and Grazing Merit $. The triannual evaluations published by the Council on Dairy Cattle Breeding (CDCB) incorporate genomic data along with updated performance, or phenotypic, data on individual animals. (For a recap on the traits and indexes, see Making sense of dairy sire summaries.)
Dairy producers worldwide use these evaluations each and every day for breeding, culling, and other management decisions. How those genetic values are used on farms is common knowledge, but where they come from may be a mystery to some.
December 2, 2024
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