Genetic evaluation of calving ease for Walloon Holstein dairy cattle.

Calving complications have an incidence on the economic profitability of dairy herds. In the Walloon Region of Belgium, calving ease data recording is being done on voluntary basis since 2000. This allows now the implementation of a genetic evaluation of Holstein dairy cattle addressing the need of dairy breeders to select bulls in order to reduce frequency of calving problems.
Calving ease scores were analyzed using univariate animal linear models, which were fitted with the genetic correlation between direct and maternal additive genetic effects either estimated or constrained to zero. Variance components and related genetic parameters were estimated from a dataset including 33,155 calving records. Included in the models were fixed season effects, fixed herd effects and fixed sex of calf*age of dam classes*group of calvings interaction effects, random herd*year of calving effects, random maternal permanent environment effects, and random animal direct and maternal additive genetic effects.
For both models, direct and maternal heritabilities for calving ease were about 8% and about 2%, respectively. Genetic correlation between direct and maternal additive effects was found to be non-significantly different from zero. So, an animal linear model with genetic correlation between direct and maternal effects constrained to zero was adopted for the routine genetic evaluation of calving ease for Walloon Holstein dairy cattle. This model was validated by Interbull in January 2013 and, since April 2013, the Walloon Region of Belgium has officially participated to the international MACE evaluation for calving traits.