By Gert Pedersen Aamand, NAV

Fertility has been an important trait in the breeding goal in the Nordic countries during the last decades and is nowadays seen as an important breeding goal trait worldwide. Establishment of an international evaluation has been discussed for years and Interbull has studied the possibilities during the most recent years. The first international breeding values for female fertility for Holstein will be released 12th February 2007.

To ensure high quality of the services Interbull requires that all countries fulfil a set of statistical tests (normally called Interbull tests). Interbull conducted a test run in September 2006 including all countries sending fertility data earlier than 1 September 2006. NAV send data but had not done the Interbull tests which normally are required since they were not required for the test run and NAV had an overload of work due to implementing a NAV routine run for mastitis.

In relation to fertility a lot of discussion has taken place if Interbull tests could be applied for fertility or not. Furthermore it has been a bit unclear for us until recently if the validation tests were required for participation in the international evaluation for fertility. NAV has done the test when we introduced a NAV routine run for fertility, but due to overload of work we have not been able to repeat the work in 2006. NAV will conduct the needed statistical test as soon as possible and deliver data to the next Interbull test run in March 2007 and participate in 2nd Routine run May 2007.