Sustainability of breeding programmes
How to evaluate the sustainability of breeding programmes?
Breeding is an activity over long time. This is especially the case for species having long generation intervals and low reproduction (bearing single fetus). Thus it si most evident with dairy cows, also as they have great impact on the income for the farmer/owner. Consequetnly the breeding has to be handled so in the future it does not put the species/breed at risk to get extinct. The genetic variation is the corner stone.
A number of moments should be scrutinized to systematically evaluate the sustainability in a breeding program. Such a systematics for evaluation has been developed by a number of well known international farm animal geneticists and is duly accepted as a good working tool. It contains 10 steps and gives good guidance for a breeding program's sustainability.
Read the full article about sustainable breeding here.
The photo shows diversity in color between several Norwegian cattle breeds, and is taken by Anna Rehnberg at the Norwegian genetic resource centre.