Short communication: Genetic evaluation of stillbirth in US Brown Swiss and Jersey cattle

Abstract

Stillbirth (SB) often results in reduced milk yield, compromised reproductive performance, and decreased dam longevity. Corrective mating can be used as a short-term solution to the problem, but long-term improvement of the population requires the routine calculation of genetic evaluations. Breeding values for SB have been available for Holstein (HO) bulls since 2006, but not for Brown Swiss (BS) or Jersey (JE) bulls. In this study, a multi-breed sire-maternal grandsire threshold model was used to perform genetic evaluations for SB of BS, JE, and HO bulls using more than 14 million purebred and crossbred calving records. Phenotypically, the percentage of SB (%SB) across all lactations were 3.7% in JE, 5.1% in BS, and 6.3% in HO. Direct heritabilities for BS, JE, and HO were 0.008, 0.007, and 0.008, and maternal heritabilities were 0.002, 0.016, and 0.021, respectively. Compared with HO, crossbred calvings from BS and JE bulls bred to HO cows lowered %SB by 1.5 and 1.2%, respectively. In general, %SB increased considerably as calving difficulty increased in all 3 breeds; however, in JE, %SB was constant for dystocia scores of 3 (needed assistance), 4 (considerable force), and 5 (extreme difficulty). Compared with purebred HO calvings, purebred BS and JE calvings had lower phenotypic %SB by up to 5.5 and 7.8%, respectively, and BS × HO and JE × HO crossbred calvings decreased %SB by up to 3.8 and 4.1%, respectively. As expected, SB rates in primiparous cows were higher than those in multiparous cows. Female calves had greater %SB than male calves in all parities for JE and in second-and-later parities for BS. Favorable (decreasing) phenotypic and genetic trends from 1999 to 2009 were observed in all 3 breeds. Heterosis of SB for BS and JE was −0.026 and −0.149, respectively, on the underlying scale, which corresponds to effects on service-sire SB (SSB) and daughter SB (DSB) predicted transmitting ability (PTA) of −0.3 and −0.5% in BS, and −1.5 and −2.7% in JE. Overall, in the current population, BS bulls had the most desirable average SSB PTA of 4.8%, compared with 5.6% for JE and 5.5% for HO. Brown Swiss and JE bulls both had average DSB PTA of 6.5%, lower than that of 7.7% in HO. Average reliabilities of SSB and DSB in 3 breeds ranged from 45 to 50%. The use of a BS-JE-HO multibreed genetic evaluation for SB in the United States is feasible, and the addition of SSB and DSB to the lifetime net merit selection index will help improve the profitability of BS and JE cattle in the United States.