One of the best things about modern agriculture is how effective genetic selection and new farming techniques have led to a huge increase in the amount of food that can be grown. For example, milk production from dairy cows has more than doubled in the last 50 years, even though the number of cows has gone down by a lot. This was mostly done by making production systems more efficient, using direct genetic selection for milk yield and a few other traits, and using new technologies (e.g., artificial insemination and genomic selection). Even though production efficiency has improved a lot, there have been big problems along the way. First, the use of only a few common dairy breeds around the world led to a big drop in both the genetic diversity between breeds and the genetic diversity within breeds. Intensive selection for milk yield has also led to genetic changes that are bad for things like fertility, health, lifespan, and sensitivity to the environment. In the future, the dairy industry needs to keep improving the current selection indexes and breeding goals to put more emphasis on animal welfare, health, longevity, environmental efficiency (like methane emission and feed efficiency), and overall resilience. This needs to be done by coming up with criteria (traits) that (a) accurately represent the biological mechanisms behind each phenotype, (b) can be passed down from parent to child, and (c) can be measured cheaply in a large number of animals as early in life as possible. Long-term success for the dairy cattle industry will also require diversifying production systems and putting more money into developing genetic resources that can handle changes in farming systems that don’t have as much control over the environment (e.g., organic, agroecological, and pasture-based, mountain-grazing farming systems). Local breeds should be kept, their genes should be improved, and they should be used in the modern dairy cattle industry. Also, more care should be taken to keep dairy cattle populations from losing more genetic diversity. In this review, we look at the genetic progress made in high-yielding dairy cattle, which is closely linked to the intensification of dairy farms and has reached its limits. We talk about the most important things that need to be done to create a strong and long-lasting dairy industry that meets the basic needs of each animal and makes them happy, while also minimising the impact on the environment, the amount of inputs needed, and the sensitivity to outside factors.
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