Faculty of Technical Sciences

Crossbreeding is the most common breeding system for pigs and poultry, but not for dairy cattle. When selecting purebred lines for crossbred performance, it becomes possible to take advantage of both breed complementarity and heterosis. In this paper, we present a new structure of dairy cattle breeding with the aim to improve crossbred performance in production cows. The structure
of the dairy sector can be organised like a pyramid with nucleus herds, multiplier herds, and production herds. Genetic improvement of purebreds takes place in the nucleus. Surplus females from the breeding nucleus are transferred to the multiplier level, where they are used as dams of crossbred animals for production herds. In addition, we hypothesise that joint breeding planning and formulation of breeding goals for each parental breed are necessary in order to optimise
crossbred performance.