Effects of Crossbreeding on Reproductive Performance of Dairy Cattle

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Abstract
Observa-tion on 86 first generation females indicated that for 7 measures used namely; services per conception, age at 1st calving, interval from 1st service to conception, gestation length, calving interval, calving date to 1st heat and calving date to 1st service, estimates of the effect of system of mating were consistent, small and non-significant. This evidence supports the concept of the relative unimportance of non-additive gene action in effecting variation in the measures of reproductive performance used in this study. One may infer that the cattle breeder cannot improve the measures of reproductive efficiency observed by crossbreeding to utilize non-additive gene effects. It is important to understand that the results relate only to fertile animals. This amounts to working with a conditional distribution in that one is concerned with the distribution of reproductive performance given that the animals concerned conceived and calved.