Prospects of performing multiple-country comparison of dairy sires for countries not participating in Interbull international genetic evaluations

Abstract

International trade with genetic material has lead to the foundation of Interbull, an international organization that performs international evaluations of dairy bulls, enabling countries to obtain breeding values of foreign bulls on their on scale. Not all countries have the possibility to participate in the evaluations with their own national breeding values. The aim of this study was to find an alternative method that does not require national breeding values. Argentina was used as a representative of countries without national breeding values. For this study national breeding values for 909 Argentinean bulls were available; these records were used in a normal Interbull international evaluation and used as reference. The alternative method considers Argentinean bulls as unrecorded, but correlated to bulls in other countries. This method was used with seven different correlation matrices, giving seven alternatives to compare with the reference. Results showed correlation between reference and the alternative methods ranging between 0.926 and 0.973, and loss in genetic gain between 2.82% and 11.9%. This means that this alternative method could be used for countries that do not have national breeding values to submit for international evaluations