Fiona Guinan: Genetic Resilience in Cows | Ep. 36

Achieving a high daily milk production is a primary goal when selecting cow traits in a herd, but what does it take to consistently maintain highly productive cows? It is necessary to select resilient cows that are capable of sustaining continuous milk production throughout the entire lactation period. In this episode, featuring Fiona Guinan, we delve into various crucial aspects of the subject, such as the impact of stress during early cow life; the utilization of national herd datasets for the measurement of the influence of health on resilience; the development of genetic evaluations for resilience; the evaluation of lactation curves based on daily milk records; and the correlation between pen management, perturbations, and resilience.

“We expect that consistency is a trait linked with resilience, as we start to dig deeper into perturbations’’ - Fiona Guinan, M.Sc.

What you’ll learn:

• (00:00) Highlight
• (01:55) Introduction 
• (10:31) The impacts of stress on calves 
• (18:28) Cow resilience vs. consistency 
• (23:25) Data quality for resilience genetic evaluations 
• (26:29) Cow pen management 
• (29:54) Perturbations in the milk curve of cows 
• (37:17) The final questions

Meet the guest: Fiona Guinan, M.Sc.

Experience:

• Current: Ph.D. Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; Cooperative Researcher at the Council on Dairy Cattle Breeding; Cooperative Researcher at the National Dairy Herd Information Association

Background:

• M.Sc., Quantitative Genetics (The University of Georgia)
• B.Sc., Agricultural Science (University College Dublin)

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