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Abstract
Many efforts are being made to cope with negative consequences of climate change (CC) on livestock. Among them, selective breeding of resilient animals to CC is presented as an opportunity to maintain high levels of performance regardless of variation in weather. In the present work, we proposed a set of breeding strategies to improve weather resilience in dairy goats raised in north-western European Atlantic conditions and dairy sheep raised in Mediterranean conditions while improving production efficiency at the same time. Breeding strategies differed in the selection emphasis placed on resilience traits, ranging from 0 to 40% in the index. Simulations were carried out mimicking real breeding programs including: milk yield, length of productive life, age at first kidding and mastitis incidence in dairy goats and milk, fat and protein yields, and fertility for dairy sheep. Considering the particular climatic conditions in the two regions, the predicted future climate scenarios, and genetic correlations among breeding objectives, resilience was defined as stability to weather changes for dairy goats and as the ability to improve performance under heat stress for dairy sheep. A strategy giving a selection weight of 10 and 20% for goat and sheep resilience, respectively, resulted in the best overall genetic response in terms of both, production and resilience ability. Not considering resilience in breeding programs could lead to a major production loss in future climate scenarios, whereas putting too much emphasis on resilience would result in a limited progress in milk production.
Highlights
Climate change (CC) is already affecting agriculture and livestock at many different levels, and the inclusion of thermal mitigation measures is common in agricultural and livestock production systems
In both cases, as the selection emphasis placed on weather resilience increased, the response obtained in the correlated production traits decreased, as expected
Considering all the progress achieved in all traits except resilience (Index0) after 20 generations of selection, the breeding scenario putting a 4, 25, 15, 36, and 20% of relative selection weight in milk yield, productive life, age at first kidding, mastitis incidence, and weather resilience, respectively, resulted in a high value of the index (0.570) and highest profit
Summary
Climate change (CC) is already affecting agriculture and livestock at many different levels, and the inclusion of thermal mitigation measures is common in agricultural and livestock production systems. Breeding Small Ruminants for Weather Resilience the effects of CC on livestock are focused on mitigating the short-term negative impacts, i.e., to improve the environmental conditions in which the animals are reared, but less emphasis is placed on measures aiming to deal with future scenarios to improve the ability of animals to cope with adverse environmental conditions. The inclusion of selection criteria to improve animal resilience might result in direct positive impacts on the sustainability of production systems under future scenarios of CC. Progress can be slow depending on the particular traits considered in the breeding program, and joint improvement of several traits requires complex strategies
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