WP2 - R&E biology across growing and adult phases

WP Leader: Didier Boichard - Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique (INRA)
Associate WP leader: Hélène Leclerc - IDELE
Involved partners: INRA, AU, TEAGASC, LfL, CITA, FiBL, IDELE, NOLDUS, DLO // WR, ALLICE, UDL, UNIPD
​There is a clear and growing need to be able to breed and manage cattle in such a way that optimum levels of resilience and efficiency are achieved. Breeding goals for cattle have been elaborated in the past decades, and today they consist of many functional traits besides production. However, efficiency and resilience are only considered indirectly. Performance serves as a proxy for efficiency and longevity serves as a proxy for resilience. Currently there’s an insufficient understanding of the interplay between efficiency and resilience. This is especially the case when considered across whole lifecycles (young stock and adult animals) and in varying environments. This has in large part been due to the difficulty of measuring the different component traits. Nevertheless, the increase in phenotypic data through routinely recorded information as well as increased on-farm automated recording, make it now possible to investigate efficiency and resilience and their interaction in more detail.
Objectives
The goal of WP2 is to characterize the relative contributions of key component traits to resilience and efficiency, and to determine how these traits co-vary over the whole life cycle and in a broad range of environments. This will be done in various farm systems. It will provide the information needed to weight resilience vs efficiency components according to the local production environment in the indices developed and used in WP4 and 5.
Tasks
  • T2.1 - Extension of RFI methodology to quantify the relative importance of efficiency components over time and nutritional environments
  • T2.2 – Residual productive lifespan (RPL): a new method to quantify the major resilience components in adult beef and dairy cows
  • T2.3 – Multi-site experiment to validate RFI and resilience measures, and develop precision livestock phenotyping of resilience and efficiency components.
  • T2.4 – Relationship between resilience and efficiency across life stages 
PROJECT
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