Abstract

Clustering herds for genetic evaluations may prevent the exclusion farms with insufficient number of contemporaries. Definition of similarities between herd managements was done by reducing 15 environmental descriptors to 3 principal components (PC) explaining almost 100% of the total variation. The use of PC to define herd management was a viable approach to cluster those herds permitting more data in the genetic evaluation. More comparison groups and, therefore, a better contrast between daughters, resulted in faster genetic progress per year of sires. Further research is needed to evaluate possible systematic associations between sires and management groups.

J. Vasconcelos, F. Santos, R. Barroso, A. Martins, A. Ferreira, J. Carvalheira

Proceedings of the World Congress on Genetics Applied to Livestock Production, Volume , , 24.30, 2006