Fractions of variance accounted for by additive genetic, dominance genetic, and permanent environmental effects for milk, fat, and protein yields; somatic cell score; and productive life were estimated from Holstein data used for national genetic evaluations. Contemporary group assignments were determined using the national procedure. Data included 1,973,317 milk and fat records for 812,659 cow...

Many applications of mixed linear statistical models for genetic evaluation of dairy cattle assume that genetic and residual components of variance are each constant across environments. However, this assumption is violated for production and conformation traits, which can reduce accuracy of selection and cause biases in the proportions of breeding animals chosen from each environment. Best lin...

(Co)variance components were estimated for final score and 14 or 15 linear type traits for the Ayrshire, Brown Swiss, Guernsey, Jersey, and Milking Shorthorn breeds. Appraisals from 1995 or later were used. New estimates were calculated to accommodate changes in scoring of traits and because of a change from multiplicative to additive adjustment for age and lactation stage. The adjustment metho...

Pedigree information and test-day records for the first 3 parities of Milking Shorthorn dairy cattle from 5 countries were analyzed. After editing, the data included 1,018,528 test-day records from 68,653 cows. A multiple-lactation random regression test-day model with Legendre polynomials of order 4 and a Bayesian method were used to estimate variance components for both single and multiple-co...

variace / covariance components of 227118 first lactaiom test-day milk yield records belonged to 31258 iranian holstein cows were estimated using nine random regression models. afterwards, different measures of persistency based on estimation breeding value were evaluated. three functions were used to adjust fixed lactation curve: ali and schaeffer (as), quadratic (le3) and cubic (le4) order of...

In previous studies, administration of high amounts of Co decreased the proportion of MUFA in bovine milk. The present study was conducted to examine the amount of Co needed to obtain this effect. High-yielding dairy cows (n 4), equipped with ruminal cannulas, were used in a 4 × 4 Latin square design study. The basal diet consisted of concentrate mixture (9 kg/d) without added Co and grass sila...