Milk yields were measured every 6 weeks from 21220 days after calving in either moderate or low conditioned groups of Angus, Angus x Friesian or Simford first-calf heifers for 3 successive years. Day of peak yield, peak yield and total 220 day yield were calculated by fitting 3 published equations to data on each of the breed x year x calving condition combinations. All equations ranked breed a...

Decisive heifer management for improved lactation and reduced dystocia requires a systematic analysis of age, body weight (BW), and average daily gain (ADG) using an adequately large sample size. The objective of this study was to determine effects of BW and age at first breeding and ADG until pregnancy on yields of milk, milk fat, and milk protein in the first lactation and the occurrence of d...

Shortening or omitting the dry period of dairy cows improves metabolic health in early lactation and reduces management transitions for dairy cows. The success of implementation of these strategies depends on their impact on milk yield and farm profitability. Insight in these impacts is valuable for informed decision-making by farmers. The aim of this study was to investigate how shortening or ...

This review focuses on the nutritional effects from birth until age at first calving on growth, mammary developmental changes, and first-lactation milk yield in heifer calves. The advancement in the genetic potential and the nutritional requirements of the animals has hastened the growth rate. Genetic selection for high milk yield has suggested higher growth capacity and hence increasing nutrit...

The objective of this study was to quantify how the pattern of milk production relative to time from calving is affected by parity in cows fed high quality rations. For this purpose two models; those of Emmans and Fisher (1986) and Dijkstra et al. (1997), were considered. Comparison with Wood’s (1967) function was made to evaluate their fitting ability. Daily records of milk yield from 40 cows ...

Data on 393 002 parturitions and performance in the following production cycle were collected from the SYMLEK database for 145 457 Polish Holstein-Friesian cows representing the active population in the Pomorze and Kujawy regions. The animals first calved during 2000–2012 and were used or culled by the end of 2013. GLM and FREQ procedures of the SAS package were used for the statistical calcula...

First lactation records (174) of Jersey×Sahiwal and Holstein Friesian×Sahiwal half breds under 9 sires maintained at Chandra Shekher Azad University of Agriculture and Technology, Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh, India from 1975-1983, were used to estimate the genetic parameters and to predict herd life milk yield and average milk yield per day of herd life from first lactation traits. The traits include...

Poor cow fertility has been identified as a growing problem in Irish dairy herds. In this seasonal calving and the grass based production system, poor fertility results in a significant loss in farm income (Veerkamp et al., 2001) due to forced culling or a shift in calving pattern. In order to arrest this trend, subsequent calving interval (CIV) and survival to the next lactation (SUV) has been...

Pure Holstein (HO, n=430), crosses between Swedish Red and HO (SRxHO, n=41), Montbeliarde and HO (MOxHO, n=18), and MO and SRxHO (MOxSH, n=53) were compared for milk, fat and protein yield, fat and protein percentage, somatic cell count (SCC), milking time (MT), and age at fi rst and second calving. A total of 180,933 test-day information for milk yield and MT, and 5,249 for fat and protein per...