Collation of Data and Genetic Parameter Estimation in Different Experimental Canadian Beef Cattle Populations Measured for Feed Efficiency

Abstract Text: Improvement in feed efficiency (FE) can contribute to a large increase in profitability of a beef production system but its measurement requires considerable expense and time. Hence, there is significant merit in combining existing FE databases for further genetic analyses. Four experimental datasets were collated from the University of Alberta, University of Guelph, Alberta Agriculture and Rural Development, and Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada which summed to 7317 FE records after edits. Residual feed intake (RFI) and residual intake and gain (RIG) were calculated across the entire dataset as measures of FE. (Co)variance components were estimated between datasets. Heritability of RFI across all datasets was 0.41 and varied from 0.29 to 0.48 within dataset. Genetic correlations between datasets for RFI ranged between 0.77 and 0.86 indicating that it is appropriate to pool data from the aforementioned datasets. Similarly, genetic correlations for RIG ranged from 0.75 to 0.85.

Keywords: feed efficiency