ESTIMATES OF SIRES BREEDING VALUES, AND GENETIC AND PHENOTYPIC TRENDSFOR VARIOUS ECONOMIC TRAITS IN MURRAH BUFFALOS

Best linear unbiased prediction (BLUP) procedures was used to obtain t he estimates of sire's breeding values (EBV) from performance records of 561 daughters of 37 sires of Murrah buffaloes collected during 1943 -72 at military dairy farm, Jabalpur. First lactation traits included in the study were age at carving (AFC), lactation milk yield (FLMY), l actation length (FLL), dry period (FDP) and calving interval (FCI); an d lifetime traits wire number of lactations completed (NLC), herdlife (HL) and lifetime milk yield (LTMY). Model for BLUP included the seaso n and year of calving and sire's genetic group as fixed effects and si re within sire genetic group as random effect. The annual genetic tren d was obtained from regression of weighted average of sire's breeding values for each years. Linear regression of phenotypic means of years on year was taken as phenotypic trend. The EBV's showed large variatio n between sires for first lactation and lifetime traits. Rank correlat ions between first lactation and lifetime traits ranged between -0.84 and 0.83. Rank correlations among the EBV's of sire for different trai ts indicated that the sires ranked differently for first lactation and lifetime traits. The EBV's of sire for AFC and FLMY were negatively c orrelated with EBV's for lifetime production traits. The annual geneti c trends for AFC, FLMY, FLL, FDP and FCI were -34.32+/-2.33 days, -14. 43+/-2.04 kg, -0.52+/-0.21 days, 4.27+/-0.19 days and 3.92+/-0.39 days respectively, The corresponding annual phenotypic trends for these tr aits were 23.27+/-2.22 days, 1.24+/-3.27 kg, 1.03+/-0.62 days, 1.71+/- 0.89 days and -0.86+/-1.05 days respectively. Relationship between the sire's breeding values for FLMY with their dam's first lactation or t he best lactation milk yield were low. Results suggested that selectio n of bulls based on dam's milk production is not a suitable selection criterion for bringing genetic improvement in the herd. Therefore majo r selection of bulls should be done on the basis of first lactation mi lk yield of their daughters.