Methodology for the Evaluation of Crossbred Dairy Cattle

Efforts are being made at different places in India to record the performance of dairy animals. In view of the heterogeneous managemental practices among households under field conditions, the methodology developed and practiced for analysis of data under different conditions in other countries may not be exactly suitable for data under field conditions in India. Therefore, it is of primary importance to identify appropriate analytical models and methods to analyze the data on dairy animals managed under field conditions, so that genetically superior animals could be selected as breeding animals. The high product-moment and rank correlations between true values and the breeding values estimated by LS, SRLS, BLUP, and REML methods for different sizes of data sets at all the three levels of heritability indicated that these four methods are more or less similar in their accuracy for estimating the breeding values and ranking of bulls.