Sustainability & efficiency

Rebalancing Breeding objectives Towards the Dairy Cow of 2050: Economic Impacts of Including Methane and Feed Intake in Selection Indices

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Abstract

Achieving Net-Zero emissions has become a central objective across many sectors, including livestock production. Ruminants play a unique role in agricultural systems, relying on natural and cultivated land while contributing methane emissions derived from microbial fermentation in the rumen. Both methane output and land use are recognised as anthropogenic sources of greenhouse gases. Although the accounting of livestock emissions in climate assessments remains subject to debate, there is broad scientific and technical agreement on the need to reduce emissions. Consequently, an increasing number of countries are incorporating methane emissions and feed efficiency into the breeding goals of their national improvement programmes.In this study, we developed economic selection indices for several dairy production systems: conventional, cheese-oriented, and organic incorporating production traits, functional traits, and sustainability-related traits such as enteric methane emissions and feed intake. Relative to a baseline scenario in which no emphasis was placed on sustainability, optimisation consistently assigned a negative economic weight to methane emissions, ranging from 1-2% in conventional and cheese-focused systems to 11% in organic systems. Feed intake also received a negative weight of 13-15% across all systems. The inclusion of these traits came primarily at the expense of milk and protein yield, with the greatest trade-offs observed in organic systems. Longevity also experienced a slight reduction in weight across scenarios.Predicted genetic responses showed the largest expected gains for reduced methane emissions and improved feed efficiency, accompanied also by reduced genetic progress in production traits and longevity.Overall, these results highlight the substantial influence that sustainability traits can exert on selection outcomes when integrated into economic breeding objectives. Including methane emissions and feed intake in selection indices is likely to shape the phenotype of the future dairy cow by 2050, emphasising environmental efficiency alongside traditional productivity metrics.

Keywords: 2026

How to Cite:

González-Recio, O., Jiménez-Montero, J., López-Paredes, J., Mohedano, A. & Teran, E., (2026) “Rebalancing Breeding objectives Towards the Dairy Cow of 2050: Economic Impacts of Including Methane and Feed Intake in Selection Indices”, World Congress on Genetics Applied to Livestock Production Digital Archive 2026(1): 2287300. doi: https://doi.org/10.31274/wcgalp.24259

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