Life Sciences Commons^™

Clearing The Air Between Methane And Commercial Beef Cattle In Ireland, Clodagh V. Ryan

ORBioM (Open Research BioSciences Meeting)

Background

Rumen methanogenesis is the single most significant source of anthropogenic methane (CH₄) emissions. This research aimed to analyse CH₄ data recorded by GreenFeed systems by assessing the repeatability of such phenotypic measures, estimating the heritability of CH₄, and generating CH₄ estimated breeding values (EBVs) for inclusion in the national breeding index_.

Methods

CH₄ measurements were recorded on 979 cattle for 20 to 83 days using GreenFeed machines, resulting in 211,136 individual CH₄ observations. The phenotypic repeatability of CH₄ was estimated for six different averaging periods using a linear mixed …

Genetic Variations In The Myostatin Gene Among Irish Cattle Breeds, Cliona Ann Ryan

ORBioM (Open Research BioSciences Meeting)

No abstract provided.

Mining Of Producer Recorded Data; Using Beef Calf And Cow Live-Weight Data As A Case Study, Shauna Walsh

ORBioM (Open Research BioSciences Meeting)

Animal live-weight contributes to profitability in beef herds and is a key determinant of overall efficiency of the beef sector. The objective was to develop a novel editing criteria for anomaly detection of beef cow and calf live-weight data. Live-weight data from five sources (i.e., professionally-recorded, owned-scales, borrowed-scales, scales hired from a depot, other) were available from the Irish Cattle Breeding Federation.

A number of alternative methods were used for anomaly detection including: generation of within-herd regression estimates, partial correlations between cow and calf live-weight records and mahalanobis distance. Across each method a value was calculated for each herd based …

Validation Of The Irish National Sheep Genetic Evaluations, Niamh Barry

ORBioM (Open Research BioSciences Meeting)

Background: In Ireland, national sheep genetic evaluations have been implemented since 2009, however, to date no large scale study has been undertaken to investigate the accuracy of genetic evaluations in a large multi-breed population. The aim of this study was to validate the estimated breeding values (EBV) on a range of traits, using national data comprising 203,469 records across a range of phenotypic traits from 9,377 flocks.

Methods: The association between direct and maternal EBV on a range of lamb growth traits was quantified using a fixed effects model. For the lambing traits the association between direct and maternal EBV …

An Investigation Of The Novel Use Of Bacteriophages To Diagnose And Treat Johne's Disease In Cattle, Max Kevane-Campbell

ORBioM (Open Research BioSciences Meeting)

Johne’s disease is a scourge to dairy farmers all over the world. It is an infectious disease that causes chronic inflammation and lesions along the inside of the small intestine of, primarily, ruminant animals (i.e., cattle and sheep). It is an incurable disease and urgently requires new and radical intervention strategies. Apart from careful on-site farm management practices, little can be offered to farmers to reduce the risk of infection, and nothing short of livestock culling is effective once an animal becomes infected. Currently, there are no vaccines licensed in Ireland or antibiotic treatment strategies available for Johne’s disease. This …

Genetic Selection For Improved Efficiency And Profitability In Beef Cattle, David Kelly

Theses

Despite the importance of feed intake and efficiency in beef production, there are still gaps in our knowledge on optimal production efficiency traits and breeding strategies for improved feed, production and economic efficiency. The objectives of this thesis were to redefine production efficiency in growing cattle by exploiting carcass information and to validate current beef breeding goals for improving efficiency, and to investigate the relationships of feeding behaviour with performance, feed efficiency, and carcass merit. Feed intake and liveweight data were available on up to 6,088 cattle, of which 3,146 had carcass data, 4,672 had ultrasound data and 1,548 had …

Optimising The Carcass Merit Of Irish Beef Cattle Using Genetic And Non-Genetic Information At The Animal And Herd Level, David Kenny

Theses

Failure of beef carcasses to achieve desirable carcass specifications represent inefficiencies within the supply chain, namely greater carcass processing costs and the inability of the resulting primal cuts to conform to high-value market specifications. Analysis of a representative sample of prime Irish beef cattle conducted in this thesis determined that 59% of cattle fail to achieve the desired carcass specifications of the supply chain at slaughter. The objective of this thesis was to use readily available information to define strategies that could help to reduce this statistic. Firstly, the likelihood of Irish beef carcasses achieving the desired carcass specifications was …