Abstract

The New Zealand dairy industry has undertaken a substantial amount of research and development on the economic, genetic, and reproductive aspects of cattle breeding. Much of this research has been conducted within Livestock Improvement and has not been widely published. The purpose of this contract is to bring together a series of papers which provide a summary of the achievements in cattle breeding and identify challenges and directions for the future. They complement the Livestock Improvement lecture by Dr Michel Georges, in which he discusses the use of markers assisted selection as a potential tool to increase rates of genetic gain. The paper by Spelman et al.,reports the results of the first efforts to identify the contribution that this technology can make in New Zealand's dairy cattle breeding schemes.

B, Wickham

Proceedings of the New Zealand Society of Animal Production, Volume 56, , 8, 1996