Calf Australian Breeding Values for dairy calves on their way

A new set of breeding values related to calf health and mortality will be added to the tool box for dairy farmers. This is how they will work.

In the near future dairy farmers will be able to select on specific calf breeding values.

La Trobe University PhD candidate and project specialist at DataGene Michelle Axford has been undergoing research to determine if there is a genetic variation between calves that survive and thrive and those that don’t.

Michelle said essentially she has been researching to see if genomic breeding values can help breed for healthier calves.

And she has found there are a number of traits that can be selected on. They include still birth, still birth maternal, pre-weaning mortality, scours, overall health, pneumonia and calf vitality.

“Calf vitality is a new trait, similar to workability traits like temperament, and is ranking if the calf is a good calf or not good and it is ranked by the farmer from A to D,” Michelle said.

“Historically we have seen tremendous improvement with genetic traits by improving cows fertility and milk and all the things that makes a farm profitable, but calves and their genetic traits has been largely ignored,” she said.

“Historical data found about 7 per cent of calves are born dead, which is similar in other dairy countries, so we have an area we can improve on.”

Michelle said to help develop the new calf-specific Australian Breeding Values she collected data from 20,000 calves across 50 farms from around Australia.

Now the research has been done, Michelle said it would be presented to DataGene and they would make decisions on how to implement it.

“It is marvellous for farmers to have DairyBio and DataGene which can connect research and industry and farmers will be able to access the information.”

“These just give farmers additional breeding values they can select on.”
Michelle said one thing she has taken away from the research was how surprised people are that there are genetic differences in calves with things like still birth.

One of the traits they tried to find genetic differences in that didn’t work was respiratory disease.

“We didn’t have enough sick calves to detect a respiratory trait. It doesn’t mean it is not there, we just had so few cases we couldn’t detect a variation.”