RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SIRES ESTIMATED BREEDING VALUE FOR FIRST LACTATION AND LIFETIME TRAITS IN SAHIWAL AND HARIANA CATTLE

Data on Hariana and Sahiwal cows sired by 46 and 39 sires, respectivel y, and maintained at U.P. State Government Livestock farms at Chack Ga njaria and Babugarh, were used to evaluate sires for first lactation a nd lifetime productivity. First lactation trails included in the study were age at first calving, total lactation milk yield, 300-day milk y ield and lactation length. Lifetime traits were herdlife, lifetime mil k yield, productive life, number of days in milk and number of lactati ons completed. A multi-trait best linear unbiased prediction (BLUP) pr ocedure was used to estimate sire's breeding value. Multi-trait mixed model included the year-season of carving and sire genetic group as ra ndom effect. The estimates of rank and product moment correlations amo ng estimates of sire's breeding value indicated that all sires would n ot rank same for first lactation and lifetime performance traits. Howe ver, the ranks of sire for different traits revealed that 4-5% of top sires almost had similar rank for first lactation and lifetime traits. Results suggest that major culling of bulls to be used to breed cows should be done on the basis of first lactation traits. To improve the lifetime productivity of dairy animal, evaluation of dairy sires for l ifetime trails could be used as additional criteria for the bulls to b e used as sires of future bulls.