Abstract

Mortality in offspring from birth to weaning adds significantly to production costs of cattle, sheep and swine. In swine, Tess (1981) has shown that a one pig improvement in number weaned results in a 4% reduction in cost of production. The effects of survival on production costs are not as precisely estimated in other species; however, they are certain to be relatively more important in cattle and sheep with smaller numbers of progeny weaned per dam (Dickerson, 1970).

L. V Cundiff, K. E Gregory, R. M Koch

Proceedings of the World Congress on Genetics Applied to Livestock Production, Volume 5. Plenary sessions, , 310–337, 1982