Organic dairy breeding lines? – Possibilities and Requirements

Summary

Genomic breeding schemes with large cow reference populations will give room for more line division within dairy cattle breeding and therefore also for organic breeding lines. The reason is that different economic values between organic and conventional production systems are expected in the future and the existence of genotype by environment interaction will presumably be even more recognized. Therefore, correlations between organic and conventional breeding goals are expected to be significantly lower than one. This in combination with increased future “break even” correlations opens up for specific organic breeding lines.