Maternal Grandsire Model for Dairy Sire Evaluation

Abstract

In the application of best linear unbiased prediction to evaluation of dairy sires, computational considerations have required that relationships among cows and their descendants be ignored. A sire''s evaluation does not incorporate the information from all of his female relatives nor does it reflect information about the dams of his daughters. A procedure which uses this information becomes computationally feasible if some relationships are approximated. This procedure is equivalent to computing under a model which includes sire and maternal grandsires.