Genomic evaluations for crossbred dairy cattle

This short review discusses genomic evaluations for crossbreed dairy cattle from a New Zealand perspective. I briefly introduce the cow population and farm systems that have resulted in high crossbreeding rates and provide a short history of across-breed genetic and genomic evaluations used in New Zealand since 1996. I provide implementation details for the current across-breed single-step marker model (SSMM), including data sizes, solving methods, and how to account for multiple breed and breed crosses, along with a summary of the validation results. Finally, I outline future research areas that are being undertaken to improve our across-breed genomic evaluation.