2024, Vol. 7, Special Issue 7

author(s)
Vikram Jakhar, AS Yadav, SS Dhaka, Sandeep Kumar Sangwan and Mahavir Chaudhari

abstract
The success of a dairy industry in India is much dependent on buffaloes and the level of lifetime performance traits. These performance traits depend on several genetic and non-genetic factors which introduce biasness in the estimation of genetic value of performance traits. In the absence of accurate phenotypic value of milk production traits, it becomes difficult to estimate genetic parameters of the traits which determine the optimum selection criterion for planned improvement programme of the animals. Also, genetic evaluation of animals requires the assumption that phenotypic measurements are adjusted for non-genetic factors that can affect production efficiency and reproduction traits (ex. Year/period of calving, season of calving, calving order, age at calving, length of lactation) to obtain accurate estimates of the genetic parameters and the breeding value of animals. This research paper aimed to analyse the effect of various non genetic factors on Longeiveity (LV), Milk yield per day of productive life(MY/PL) and Milk yield per day of longeveity (MY/LV). The data on performance records of 2959 Murrah buffaloes, progeny of 220 sires were collected from the pedigree, breeding and performance records from 1992-2015 maintained at Buffalo Research Center (BRC), LUVAS, Hisar and Central Institute for Research on Buffaloes, Hisar. The overall least-squares means for LV, MY/PL and MY/LV were 2738.80±32.07, 4.38±0.08 and 2.03±0.04, respectively.The period of calving had highly significant effect on LV and MY/PL. The LV showed an decreasing trend across the periods. Effect of season of calving was non-significant on all the longevity traits. Regression of age at first calving (linear) had significant effect on LV and MY/LV only. Effect of various non genetic factors help us to provide a deep role of management strategies in improvement of lifetime performance traits in dairy animals and it may also lead to a better progressive strategy for increasing most probable producing ability also of the Murrah buffaloes.