Breeding improves health and functionality in dairy cattle

Health and welfare of dairy cows are increasingly being discussed negatively due to their high production level. Animal breeding is often seen as a major reason for this. In recent years, however, the focus of dairy cattle breeding has changed considerably and is now primarily aimed at improving health and functional traits by breeding. Population-wide data collection as part of milk performance testing and the implementation of the project KuhVision, which includes routine genotyping of dairy cows and collection of data for direct health traits, has provided a comprehensive database. This data forms the backbone for genomic selection, which has led to increased breeding progress, particularly in functional traits that were previously difficult to breed for. The additional collection of direct health data on farms participating in KuhVision allows the estimation of breeding values for direct health traits. Therefore, an opportunity to directly improve the genetic potential of cows in terms of health is available. The comparison of purely genomic breeding values and later disease incidence rates of animals clearly shows that estimated genomic breeding values serve as reliable selection criteria for improving animal health and, thus, welfare. Moreover, population-wide analysis of genetic and phenotypic trends demonstrates positive developments in functional traits such as longevity, thereby confirming improvements in the health of Holstein dairy cows. This has been also achieved by the high emphasis on functional traits in the overall breeding indices RZG and RZ(sic).