Creating the Perfect Dairy Cow

The dairy cow also known as "Bos Taurus" has many traits that with genetic modifying, can be perfected. Many of the desired traits can be passed down from generation to generation, by selecting the sire and dam that both have traits that balance each other out can create the offspring to have what ever traits the breeder chooses. Some of the most desired traits are stature, dairy form, rear and fore udder, feet, rump, milk yield, milk protein and milk fat. There are hundreds of traits that can create the best dairy cattle, and using the phenotype information becomes more useful in predicting genetic merit of an animal over time since more records accumulate either on the maturing animal or on its progeny."The udder is always the place to start evaluating a cow," Weigel says. "Poor udder traits are the biggest problem, followed by poor feet and leg traits. Naturally, cows that avoid mastitis or injury to their udder are going to be in the dairy herd longer. A lot of times, dairy owners focus on the body size of the cow and for some reason they want big cows. At livestock shows, large dairy cattle often place well, even though body size really doesn't affect the productive life of the cow." Each herd has different strengths and goals in what their herd needs to become to become successful. Either the herd is meant for the milk production, or is meant for artificial insemination and showing. Artificial insemination is a process in which sperm is processed and stored into a females uterus for purpose of conception. AI is one of the most important techniques in genetics for improvement of farm animals. By recording all the phenotypes from generation to generation, the DNA can be traced to help future offspring be perfected.