Farmers' preferences for breeding goal traits and selection indexes for Slovenian dairy cattle

Abstract

The aim of the study was to determine the role played by farmers' sociodemographic factors in the characteristics of dairy farmers' breeding goals and how they are clustered in Slovenia. Understanding how farmers formulate their breeding objectives is crucial because their perspectives may diverge from those of the stakeholders engaged in selection and breeding. Involving farmers in the process of setting breeding goals can improve the use of selection tools and confidence in the selection process. For a more complete picture of how farmers view breeding work, their expectations, and the changes they would prefer to see in the future in terms of new traits and a total merit index, a mixed methods approach was used. Initially, 3 focus groups with 30 participants were conducted on the following main topics: farmers' needs and attitudes regarding genomic selection, the main barriers and advantages to adopting genomic selection, the design of a total merit index, and preferences for breeding goals. To generalize the results to the whole population, an additional online questionnaire was sent to dairy farmers affiliated with Slovenian breeding associations, with 212 farmers responding. Based on how the farmers distributed weights across the trait categories in the total merit index, a cluster analysis identifies 3 distinct groups of farmers. Milk production proved to be an important common factor for all farmers, especially production-focused ones. Functionality-focused farmers expressed the strongest preference for fertility (22%), longevity (18%), and animal health (18%), whereas resilience-focused farmers concentrated on fertility (13%), health (13%), longevity (11%), and workability (11%). Yet, the results also showed that dairy farmers hold quite similar preferences for breeding goal traits, with animal health and welfare, reproductive traits, dominating across the sample and environmental and meat traits being the least important. The quantitative analysis of the preference for new environmental traits showed that farmers express less importance to them due to pressure and negative public opinion about the environmental impact of dairy farming. The focus group participants, although acknowledging that adaptation to climate change and heat stress will be essential, were even more negative about traits related to greenhouse gas emissions, which can be attributed to negative public opinion and constraints on agricultural activity.