Herd clustering strategies and corresponding genetic evaluations based on social–ecological characteristics for a local endangered cattle breed

The accuracy of breeding values strongly depends on the population and herd structure, i.e., the number of animals considered in genetic evaluations and the size of contemporary groups (CGs). Local breeds are usually kept in small-sized family farms under alternative husbandry conditions. For such herd structure, consideration of classical herd or herd-test-day effects in CG modeling approaches implies only a few records per effect level. In consequence, the present study aimed on methodological evaluations of different herd clustering strategies, considering social–ecological and herd characteristics. In this regard, we considered 19 herds keeping cows from the small local population of German Black Pied cattle (Deutsches Schwarzbuntes Niederungsrind; DSN), 10 herds keeping Holstein Friesian (HF) cows and one mixed herd with HF and DSN cows. Herds were characterized for 106 variables, reflecting farm conditions, husbandry practices, feeding regime, herd management, herd fertility status, herd health status and breeding strategies as well as social–ecological descriptors. The variables were input data for different clustering approaches including agglomerative hierarchical clustering (AHC), partition around medoids (PAM), fuzzy clustering (FZC) and a clustering of variables combined with agglomerative hierarchical clustering (CoVAHC). The evaluation criterion was the average silhouette width (ASW), suggesting a CoVAHC application and consideration of four herd clusters (HCs) for herd allocation (ASW of 0.510). HC1 comprised the larger, half organic and half conventional DSN family farms, which generate their main income from milk production. HC2 consisted of small organic DSN family farms where cows are kept in tie stables. HC3 included the DSN sub-population from former East Germany, reflecting the large-scale farm types. The specialized HF herds were well separated and allocated to HC4. Generalized linear mixed models with appropriate link functions were applied to compare test-day and female fertility traits of 5538 cows (2341 DSN and 3197 HF) from the first three lactations among the four HCs. Least squares means for milk, fat and protein yield (Mkg, Fkg and Pkg) significantly differed between HC. The significant differences among the four HCs clearly indicate the influence of varying herd conditions on cow traits. The similarities of herds within HC suggested the application of HCs in statistical models for genetic evaluations for DSN. In this regard, we found an increase of accuracies of estimated breeding values of cows and sires and of heritabilities for milk yield when applying models with herd-cluster-test-day or herd-cluster-test-month effects compared to classical herd-test-day models. The identified increase for the number of cows and cow records in CG due to HC effects may be the major explanation for the identified superiority.