Relationships among early performance, lifetime production and reproduction traits in Murrah buffaloes

Abstract

Data on 2 107 Murrah buffaloes maintained at 4 military dairy farms and 3 UP State Go:vernment farms during 1961-88, were used to estimate heritabilities, genetic and phenotypic correlations between early and lifetime performance traits, Model used for estimation of sire and residual variance and covariance components included year and season of calving and farm as fixed effects, sires within farms as random effect, and weight at first calving as covariable. Heritability estimates for age at first calving, rust lactation milk yield, first lactation length, first calving interval, first dry period, milk yield per day of first lactation length, milk yield per day of first calving interval were 0.20±0.05, 0.22+-0.05, 0.010.04, 0.18+-0.05, 0.17+-0.05, 0.17%0.05 and 0.11+-0.04 respectively. Heritabilities for lifetime production traits were lower than heritability estimates of rust lactation traits. Lifetime reproduction traits had low heritability. First lactation production traits were positively correlated with lifetime production traits. Results indicate that selection for improving first lactation milk yield would also bring genetic improvement in lifetime production traits and profit.