Prediction of Body Weight of Primiparous Dairy Cows Throughout Lactation

Abstract Text: Body weight (BW) can be computed using linear conformation traits (CBW). However, these traits are recorded mostly once during a lactation. Therefore, predicted BW (PBW) is needed throughout the lactation (e.g., allowing feed intake prediction in milk recording systems). A two-step procedure was developed to obtain PBW using a random regression test-day model using CBW as observations. Added second step consisted in changing prior distribution for additive genetic random effects using results from first step to predict again PBW. This method was applied on 24,919 primiparous Holstein cows having 25,061 CBW to obtain PBW for 232,436 test-days. Results showed that applying both steps provided more accurate estimates than using only the first step. Furthermore, this procedure predicting PBW throughout lactation is also extremely flexible because actual BW can also be used together with CBW, the prediction model being able to accommodate different levels of accuracies.

Keywords: dairy_cattle body_weight feed_intake