Abstract
Dairy farming may have negative impacts on the environment, such as ammonia emissions to air and nitrate leaching to water. By selecting more efficient cows, the amount of nitrogen excreted per cow and consequently the adverse environmental impacts will be reduced. The aim of this study was to predict nitrogen use efficiency (NUE) of individual dairy cows using mid-infrared (MIR) spectra of milk. A total of 600 feeding and MIR records of 56 Holstein cows were collected from a farm in Beijing, China. NUE was calculated as the ratio of nitrogen in milk to nitrogen intake. The coefficient of determination of the best model was 0.69, 0.62 and 0.70 for NUE, nitrogen loss and dry mater intake, respectively. The MIR wavenumbers around 981.00 and 1506.93 cm-1 and daily milk yield were the most important variables for prediction. These results show potential for large-scale genetic evaluations of nitrogen efficiency.
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