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The Value of Group Records in Predicting Breeding Values for Individual Feed Intake in Pigs
Feed intake from 520 Duroc pigs distributed in pens of 10 animals was registered to obtain both daily Individual Feed Intake (IFI) and daily Pen average Feed Intake (PaFI). Correlation coefficients between Breeding Value (BV) predictions from PaFI and IFI records were computed with two models, including or not the pen effect. We observed a correlation of 0.40 between PaFI and IFI BV predictions of animals with data; thus, PaFI records do not allow obtaining the same ranking of animals as that obtained when IFI records are available. It was not possible to associate correlations between BV predictions by batches to average genetic relatedness among individuals within and across pens in the batches. The correlations between rankings obtained from IFI and PaFI from the model without pen effect were comparable to those reported in other species.
Keywords:
pigs
feed intake
pen records
breeding value prediction
