Where is Dairy Cattle Breeding Going? A Vision of the Future

Genomic selection in dairy cattle breeding is a breakthrough such as the industry has not experienced since progeny test. It will have marked consequences on genetic evaluation methodology but also, and more deeply, on the organization of breeding schemes, on expected genetic gain and relative weight of traits in breeding objectives, on the nature and distribution of some related activities such as performance recording, on the structure of breeding companies and on the emergence of new actors. Multi-breed management of selection could make it possible to share reference populations and to save resources and money. Genomic selection opens new opportunities to improve functional traits and to meet new environmental and/or societal requirements, and probably to differentiate competitors via inclusion of specific and original traits. Very large reference populations offer a unique opportunity to elucidate the genetic determinism of many traits, even complex. In the longer term, big challenges are prediction of interactions between genes, prediction of genotype x environment interactions and adaptation to particular environmental conditions. The appropriate conditions using of genomic selection should be carefully studied in developing countries, because their environment is strongly different from developed countries and because accurate phenotypes are difficult to obtain on a large and reliable scale. This paper will review some of these topics.