Improving female fertility and calf survival in the UK beef industry

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Fertile suckler beef cows and low calf mortality are essential for profitable beef production systems. Toimprove cow fertility and calf survival national data will be used to develop genomic breeding values forfertility and survival. Genomic selection is a novel breeding tool which increases the rate of geneticimprovement for traits that have traditionally been difficult to improve, like fertility and survival. As aresult the overall efficiency of the UK beef industry can be improved as cows will be more fertile andproduce more calves in their lifetime and more calves will survive. This will increase production, but justas important do it in a sustainable way that ultimately will reduce the greenhouse gas emissions per kgbeef produced. This project is innovative as beef genomics is still in its infancy and there are currently nobreeding tools available for the genetic improvement of survival.