Genetic evaluation of Hariana sires for test day milk records and first lactation milk yield

Abstract

Best linear unbiased prediction (BLUP) procedure was used to estimate the breeding values of 23 Hariana sires (518 daughters). Model for BLUP included year-season of calving and sire's genetic group as fixed effect and sire within sire genetic group as random effect. The estimates of breed 109 value of sires for first lactation milk Yield (FLMY) ranged from -34 to 523 kg. The product moment and rank correlations between estimates of breeding value for test day milk records (TD) and FLMY ranged from 0.23 to 0.95 and 0.31 to 0.93 respectively. The high product moment and rank correlations between the estimated breeding values of sires for test day yields (TD2, TD3 and TD4) and FLMY revealed that any of these 3 test day milk records could successfully be utilized for genetic evaluation of sires for first lactation milk yield.