Improving female fertility and calf survival in the UK beef industry

肥沃的乳汁肉牛和低小牛死亡率是盈利的牛肉生产系统必不可少的。为了提高奶牛的生育力和小牛的存活率，将利用国家数据开发生育力和存活率的基因组育种价值。基因组选择是一种新的育种工具，它提高了传统上难以提高的性状（如生育力和存活率）的遗传改良率。因此，英国牛肉产业的整体效率可以得到提高，因为奶牛将更有生育能力，在它们的一生中生产更多的小牛，更多的小牛将存活下来。这将增加产量，但同样重要的是以可持续的方式进行，最终将减少每公斤牛肉的温室气体排放。这个项目是创新的，因为牛肉基因组学仍处于起步阶段，目前没有育种工具可用于遗传改善生存。

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.