Wallenbeck, Anna
- Department of Animal Biosciences, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
Abstract
Local/ native breeds are indirectly or explicitly recommended in organic standards. They may be better adapted to local, and especially organic, conditions characterized by a stronger dependency on local feed resources, higher amounts of pasture-based feeding systems and/or lower amounts of concentrate feeding, as well as stronger restrictions regarding medicine use. Nevertheless, little knowledge is available regarding health status, medicine use and phenotypic functional characteristics of local/native breeds in organic dairy production in Europe. Therefore, local and commercial dairy breeds from organic farms were compared regarding direct health traits, health associated functional and conformation traits as well as production traits with the aim to map the suitability of local breeds for organic farms in the respective countries. The study included data from organic herds from Austria, Germany, Poland, Sweden and Switzerland for the period 01.07.2011 to 30.06.2014. Preliminary results reveal lower milk yield for local breeds, but in many cases better fertility (shorter calving intervals, lower number of inseminations). Limited data on useful lifetime indicates a superiority of local breeds for this trait, whereas commercial breeds showed a higher lifetime production (kg ECM).
Published in
Annual meeting of the European Association for Animal Production
2016, number: 22, pages: 307-307
Title: Book of Abstracts of the 67th Annual Meeting of the European Federation of Animal Science
Publisher: Wageningen Academic Publishers
Conference
67th Annual Meeting of the European Federation of Animal Science
SLU Authors
UKÄ Subject classification
Genetics and Breeding in Agricultural Sciences
Publication identifier
- ISBN: 978-90-8686-284-9
- eISBN: 978-90-8686-830-8
Permanent link to this page (URI)
https://res.slu.se/id/publ/79514