Sustainability & efficiency

Genetic Correlations Between Sniffer and GreenFeed Methane Measurements Enable Genomic Selection in Dairy Cattle

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Abstract

Selective breeding has been proposed as one of the most efficient strategies to improve dairy cattle productivity and reduce its carbon footprint because it is permanent, cumulative and cost-effective. Breeding for sustainability faces significant challenges due to 1) the lack of testing the potential impact on other important traits, 2) the scarcity of routine recording of sustainability traits, and 3) the associated recording costs. Still, it has recently become one of the priorities of the dairy industry due to current environmental policies and social perspective of livestock industry. Implementing selection for reduced methane emissions requires establishing a reference population with both phenotypic records and genotypes to enable genomic selection. Sniffer systems are becoming increasingly popular for measuring methane emissions on commercial farms and for building such reference populations. However, there are still few estimates of their genetic correlation with more established and traditionally considered reliable devices, such as respiration chambers or greenfeeds. The aim of this study was to estimate the genetic correlations between methane measurements obtained using sniffer systems and GreenFeed units in a commercial dairy cattle population under both conventional and organic management systems. Conventional farms follow a Total Mixed Ration diet, whereas organic farms were mainly fed on pastures with supplementation during the milking with concentrate. After quality control, the dataset consisted of 22,967 weekly mean methane records from sniffers (mean 319.5 ± 104.54 g/day) collected from 4,156 cows, and weekly averages from GreenFeed methane records (mean 361.3 ± 82.0 g/day) for 138 cows across four farms (two conventional and two organic). Sires had an average of 23.5 daughter records for methane, ranging from 1 to 256, with 37 sires represented in both measurement systems. Methane measurements from GreenFeed or sniffers were considered as different traits, and a bivarite linear mixed model (BLUP) was fitted using a pedigree of 23,987 animals, and analyses were conducted with the BLUPF90+ suite. Heritability for methane records obtained with sniffers was estimated at 0.15 (s.e. 0.027), whereas the estimate for GreenFeed measurements was 0.67 (s.e. 0.55). The approximate genetic correlation between the two traits was 0.63 (s.e. 0.41). A high genetic correlation was also observed between methane emissions recorded under conventional and organic production systems. Genetic trends over the past 40 years indicated increasing emissions until

Keywords: 2026

How to Cite:

Benhissi, H., Garcà­a-Rodrà­guez, A., Goiri, I., González-Recio, O., Jiménez-Montero, J., Martà­nez‐Álvaro, M., Saez-Torillo, S. & Varsaki, A., (2026) “Genetic Correlations Between Sniffer and GreenFeed Methane Measurements Enable Genomic Selection in Dairy Cattle”, World Congress on Genetics Applied to Livestock Production Digital Archive 2026(1): 2287285. doi: https://doi.org/10.31274/wcgalp.24256

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