Comparing crossbred and purebred dairy cows for economically important traits

Sammanfattning: The use of dairy x dairy crossbreeding as a breeding strategy has increased in Sweden, which has led to an increase of Brown Swiss, Jersey and Montbéliarde crosses. Multiple studies have been done on Montbéliarde and Jersey crossbreds in the USA but to our knowledge, no such study has been done on Swedish data. This study aimed to compare two-way crosses, three-way crosses and backcrosses between Holstein (H), Swedish Red (R), Jersey (J), Montbéliarde (M) and Brown Swiss (B) to purebred H, R and J for fertility, calving, production and survival traits. There were 2 750 949 observations and 7 390 herds included in this study for cows that calved between 2005-01-01 and 2020-12-30. The records were collected from Växa´s cattle database. The data were separated into two groups, lactation 1 and lactation 2-3, and analysed by using a mixed linear model. The J crosses (JH, JR, HxJR, JxHR, RxJH) (sire x dam) were significantly better or similar to J for all traits and for fertility traits were J crosses better or similar compared with H and R. For production traits MH was similar or better than H and R and for calving traits and survival MxHR was better than H.