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Information System for Agriculture and Food Research

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Development of a sustainable breeding program 'Goats with organic farming' (GoOrganic)

Project


Project code: 2815NA027, 5680
Contract period: 01.04.2016 - 31.07.2019
Budget: 253,849 Euro
Purpose of research: Applied research

The project develops strategies how to organize and implement a sustainable, resource-efficient and ecological breeding program. Dairy goat breeding is taken as a model in this case due to their relatively high importance for organic farming and due to the so far less developed breeding structures. Based on the basic idea of organic farming, livestock, its production environment, the breeding program and the breeding value estimation are seen as a system which can only be developed and set into practice conjointly. Overall goals of the project are the implementation of a sustainable and resource-efficient breeding program with the breeding goals “High milk-lifetime-performance with high ingredients and robustness especially in relation to pasturing”; derivation of appropriate traits and establishment of an adapted performance testing; strengthening of the individual responsibility of breeders and active involvement in the breeding program. Steps within the project are the development of a breeding value estimation for milk-lifetime-performance respectively -lifetime-effectiveness, the establishment of a monitoring for health and robustness traits, and the implementation of planned mating of buck sires and dams by involving the goat keepers and by considering natural mating as the dominant mating system. The central database ZDV has to be further developed for being able to store the identified traits and make them accessible for breeding value estimation and for goat keepers.

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