Increasing milk production of smallholder dairy farms in India using genomic selection

Abstract:

Despite being the largest milk producer in the world, the milk yield per cow in India is still very low. Therefore, improving the rate of genetic gain in Indian dairy cattle would be a major step towards improving its efficiency and sustainability. Genomic selection, a modern breeding tool based on high-throughput DNA marker technologies, holds the potential to deliver substantial improvements for dairy cattle in India.

As part of a project funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, we developed a genomic selection model for Indian crossbred dairy cattle and apply it to over 140,000 milk records from smallholder farms in six states. The model incorporates information from around 5,000 cows genotyped for over 600,000 SNPs and relevant environmental and management factors. Even though the heritability for milk yield was low-to-moderate, we found promising cross-validation accuracies for genomic estimated breeding values. Our results indicate a high potential of genomic selection to enhance breeding for milk yield in smallholder Indian dairy farms.