Producer Breeding Objectives and Optimal Sire Selection

Abstract

Information from an online survey of dairy producers was used to determine how important producers perceived three different objectives in the breeding problem. The objectives were: maximizing expected net merit of the progeny, minimizing the expected progeny inbreeding coefficient, and minimizing semen expenditure. Producers were asked to rank the three objectives and then to weight the importance of each objective relative to the others. This information was then used to determine weights to be used in a multiple-objective integer program designed to select individual mates for a herd of 76 Jersey cows with known genetic background and cow net merit. The results of the multiple-objective models show that rank and relative importance of producer objectives can affect the portfolio of sires selected. Producers whose primary objective was to maximize expected net merit had a range of average expected progeny net merit of $306 to $310, but the level of expected progeny inbreeding was from 6.99 to 10.45%, with a semen cost per conception of $35 to $41. For producers who selected minimizing progeny inbreeding as the primary goal in their breeding programs, the range of inbreeding was from 6.11 to 6.60%, with lower net merit range of $274 to $301 and semen expenditure of $30 to $37 per conception. One producer selected minimizing semen cost as the primary objective. For that producer's portfolio, the semen cost was $27 per conception and net merit was $288, with a progeny inbreeding coefficient of 10.68%. The results of this research suggest that producer information and goals have a substantial impact on the portfolio of sires selected by that producer to attain these goals.

Participatory definition of breeding objectives and selection indexes for sheep breeding in traditional systems

“…Few studies about incorporating farmers' preferences into breeding objectives have been published (Tozer and Stokes, 2002). The first step in our procedure was to translate the broad trait categories used by farmers to describe performance of their animals into traits that could be measured and included in the selection index.…”

Portfolio Selection from Multiple Benchmarks: A Goal Programming Approach to an Actual Case

“…About this issue, see Section . References to mean value‐stochastic goal programming are, among others, those of Weihua et al (), Tozer and Stokes (), Bordley and Kirkwood (), Sahoo and Biswal (), Ben Abdelaziz et al (), Muñoz and Ruiz (), Abdelaziz et al (), Bravo and González (), Chen and Hung (), and Muñoz et al ().…”

“…About this issue, see Section 3. References to mean valuestochastic goal programming are, among others, those of Weihua et al (2001), Tozer and Stokes (2002), Bordley and Kirkwood (2004), Sahoo and Biswal (2005) multi-objective programming (Steuer et al, 2005); (v) constructing equity mutual funds portfolios by goal programming (Pendaraki et al, 2004); (vi) meansemivariance efficient frontier (Ballestero, 2005b); (vii) hybrid models, neural networks and algorithms Ong et al, 2005;Lin et al, 2006); (viii) satisfaction functions are proposed to integrate the decision maker's preferences into GP models under uncertainty (Aouni et al, 2005); (ix) fuzzy techniques are useful when probability distributions are unknown (Ben Abdelaziz and Masri, 2005); and (x) portfolio selection based on Sharpe's beta is developed with and without fuzzy techniques in the studies by Bilbao et al (2006) and Ballestero et al (2009).…”

Applying stochastic goal programming: A case study on water use planning

“…This model aggregates variability from several goals and the variability matrices are weighted by the decision-maker's preferences and risk aversion coefficients relative to the goals. Papers using or referring to SGP are, among others, Tozer and Stokes (2002), Bordley and Kirkwood (2004), Sahoo and Biswal (2005). When time series of probability distributions are not explicitly known, they can be assumed to be defined by fuzzy logic (Ben Abdelaziz and Masri, 2005).…”