Suitability of simplified milk recording methods for genetic evaluations using test-day models in dairy sheep

Nowadays in dairy sheep, test-day records are collected monthly under an alternate morning/evening system. This alternate system was implemented because of the steady increase in recording cost per sheep observed in the last few decades. Furthermore, additional modifications to the testing schemes have been proposed to reduce the costs of milk recording. In dairy sheep, the cost for milk recording is indeed too high compared both with individual outputs and with other dairy species. Therefore, the purposes of the present study were: i) to compare estimated breeding values (EBVs) for milk yield using different simplified testing schemes with a test-day sire model; ii) to evaluate the effect …