Beef cattle

Genomic breeding values for residual feed intake for beef sires used for beef x dairy cross-breds

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Abstract

The use of beef semen for crossbreeding with dairy cows are increasing in Denmark, with Belgian Blue, Angus and Charolais as the most used sire breeds. For these sire breeds a breeding value for residual feed intake (RFI) is desired as RFI have a high economic value in the beef x dairy production system. The aim of this study was to estimate and validate single-step genomic estimated breeding values (ssGEBVs) for RFI for beef sires used for crossbreeding with dairy cows. Feed intake has been measured in five Danish herds since 2020, and on average each calf has feed intake measured for 30 days. Weight measures from 14 days before to 14 days after the recording period are used. From these data RFI are estimated as a full test mean. 8470 crossbred calves with Holstein dams and either Angus, Belgian Blue or Charolais sires had RFI data, of these calves 5537 had genotypes. Pedigree was traced back for 5 generations. From the pedigree data, 8099 Holsteins, 101 Angus, 133 Belgian Blue and 66 Charolais were genotyped. Variance components for RFI were estimated in DMU using pedigree data. The model used for this was a sire model with the fixed effects breed of sire, sex of calf, herd-year-season and fixed regression effect of age nested within both sire breed and sex. For single-step genomic BLUP (ssGBLUP) an animal model was used. ssGBLUP were estimated using DMU5. For validation phenotypes were removed from calves with sires born after 2017 with at least 30 offspring with data. In total, 17 sires met these criteria, and phenotypes of their offspring were removed from the full dataset to create the partial dataset. We estimated 4 estimators using linear regression (LR) method to measure the predictive ability: 1) the bias (mean difference between full and partial ssGEBV) was 0.022, 2) the dispersion regression slope was 0.38, 3) population accuracy based on these 17 sires was 0.15, and 4) Ratio of population accuracy calculated as the correlation between full and partial ssGEBV was 0.12. The results show that it is possible to estimate ssGEBVs for RFI for the beef sires, although accuracy was still modest. Increasing the size of the reference population and exploring alternative models such as metafounder-ssGBLUP may further improve the accuracy of RFI evaluations for the sires used for beef x dairy crossbreeding.

Keywords: 2026

How to Cite:

Hein, L., Karaman, E., Buitenhuis, A. & Liu, H., (2026) “Genomic breeding values for residual feed intake for beef sires used for beef x dairy cross-breds”, World Congress on Genetics Applied to Livestock Production Digital Archive 2026(1): 2286884. doi: https://doi.org/10.31274/wcgalp.24155

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