Effectiveness of various sire evaluation methods in ranking Mehsana bulls based on FL305MY and TMY under field progeny testing programme

Abstract

First lactation records of 8,072 Mehsana buffaloes, progeny of 182 bulls, spread over a period of 25 years (1989-2013) maintained under field progeny testing programme of DURDA, Dudhsagar Dairy, Mehsana, Gujarat, India were used to estimate the breeding values of Mehsana buffalo bulls for first lactation milk yield (FL305MY and TMY) by least squares, BLUP-SM and BLUP-AM methods. The effectiveness of different sire evaluation methods was compared using error variance and rank correlations among the estimated breeding values of sires. The average breeding values for FL305MY by LS, BLUP-SM and BLUP-AM were 2284.02, 2242.11 and 2256.81 litres, respectively. The corresponding values for TMY were 1913.74, 1870.57 and 1891.24 litres, respectively. BLUP-AM method had lowest error variance for both FL305MY and TMY as compared to LS and BLUPSM methods making it as the most efficient method. The rank correlation coefficients indicated that all the methods could rank the sires with fairly high accuracy with highest relative accuracy for BLUP-AM.