Genotype by environment interactions in fertility traits in New Zealand dairy cows

Abstract

New Zealand's seasonal dairy farming system entails a condensed calving pattern with cows required to conceive within approximately 12 wk of the planned start of calving. This has resulted in strong selection for fertility through culling of nonpregnant cows and relatively strong emphasis on fertility in Breeding Worth, the national breeding objective that drives sire selection. Despite this, average herd-level fertility is highly variable across New Zealand dairy farms. We studied genotype by environment interaction in fertility-related traits, with the goal of improving selection decisions in different fertility environments. We used data from the New Zealand national dairy database, which contains records on 3,743,862 animals. Herds were classified into high-, mid-, or low-fertility categories or environments based on herd average fertility performance, and data were analyzed in 2 different ways. First, we estimated genetic parameters when the fertility trait was defined specifically for each fertility environment to determine the extent to which genetic correlations between high- and low-fertility environments differed from 1 and the extent of changes in genetic variance across environments. Second, we used simple regression to evaluate the impact of ancestral genetic merit for fertility on cow fertility phenotypes to compare the effect of changes in genetic merit on phenotypic performance between fertility environments. The genetic standard deviations of fertility-related traits were 1.5 to 3.6 times higher in low-fertility herds than in high-fertility herds, and the genetic correlations between the same fertility-related traits between the high- and low-fertility environments were moderate to high, albeit with high standard errors. The high standard errors of the correlations reflected the low heritabilities of the traits and potential problems of culling bias, particularly for traits expressed in later parities. Regression analysis revealed that the bottom 30% of herds (in terms of fertility) could achieve more than twice the benefit from selection for fertility than the top 30% of herds. Although our analyses do not support separate genetic evaluations of fertility in the different environments, they indicate that low-fertility herds could benefit more from targeted selection of sires with higher fertility estimated breeding values than from selection based solely on the multitrait national index. Conversely, high-fertility herds could focus their sire selection on traits other than fertility, provided they avoid very low fertility sires.