Improved breeding for fertility in Nordic dairy cows by using new recordings and novel traits

This project is the Swedish part of the Nordic 4-year project Improving Nordic dairy cow fertility through genetics. The focus area of our Swedish part is to investigate how we best can use automated recordings to improve the genetic evaluation for fertility, such as return to normal cyclicity after calving, association to oestrus intensity and ability to remain pregnant. Records are from activity tags, milk progesterone, milk composition, and the pregnancy protein PAG. Our hypothesis is that traits we can define from these new data have sufficient good quality to be used in the routine genetic evaluation which may increase herd profitability to a low marginal cost. We will collaboratively use the recordings from the Nordic countries.