EU project to breed robust cows

16-08-2017 | Breeding | Article

A new EU funded project will look into ways to increase the resilience of cattle to an increasingly changing environment.

With a combination of more extreme weather events caused by global warming and a historical focus on breeding mostly to increase production efficiency, it is critical that cattle breeders have the tools to be able to also breed for resilience (robustness, toughness).

Adapting cattle production to specific regions

Precision livestock phenotyping is a critical element in developing such tools to be able to efficiently measure various aspects of cows’ health, welfare and behaviour in a variety of circumstances. Think of both intensive farming indoors and extensive grazing systems in mountainous areas. A main objective of the project is to make the genomic management tools available to local farmers for the adaptation of their cattle production in their specific region.

€7 million EU grant

The total EU grant amount for the GenTORE project is €7 million, funded by the Horizon 2020 research programme of the European Union. The project will run for 5 years and will be led by the French research organisation INRA. Also universities (such as Wageningen University and Aarhus University) and companies (such as Viking Genetics and Noldus) are involved.