Studies on Linear Type Traits in Graded Murrah Buffaloes

The length of a cow or buffalös productive life in a herd directly affects the profitability of the dairy farm, as longer herd life reduces replacement costs and increases the proportion of lactations from higher yielding mature animals, thus increasing chances of survival in the herd. As the significant genetic variation exists between sire families for longevity, fertility, calving performance and disease resistance. Therefore, one can improve longevity directly by selecting families that resist culling, or one can improve longevity indirectly by selecting families that excel for each of its component traits. Thus, selection for such animals can be done by determining their linear type traits, which describes the biological extremes for a range of visual characteristics of an animal and is foundation of all the systems for describing the dairy cow. These traits describe the degree of trait not the desirability, as it is based on measurements of individual type traits instead of opinions. Thus, the present investigation was designed to determine the linear type traits of graded Murrah buffaloes maintained at ABIS dairy farm, Rajnandgaon district of Chhattisgarh.