Longevity in South African Afrikaner cows as assessed through survival analysis

The Afrikaner breed of cattle is indigenous to South Africa and, due to their hardiness, was once the most popular breed amongst South African farmers, although in recent years their numbers have decreased. The goal of this study was to assess factors affecting length of productive life, defined as the interval between production of the first and last calf, in Afrikaner cattle using survival analysis. The data spanned 40 years with an observed measure of length of life for 29,379 cows from 374 herds. Relative to similar analyses, few (n = 2964; 8.4%) cows had records that were right censored. The median length of productive life of an Afrikaner cow was just less than 6 years. Cows that were younger at their first parturition had longer productive lives than those that were older at their first calving. Cows that were born in the period from December to February had shorter productive lives than those born between March and November. The estimated animal genetic variance of 0.266 resulted in a heritability estimate for length of productive life in Afrikaner cattle of 0.225. Thus, there appeared to be sufficient additive genetic variance in Afrikaner cattle to enable genetic improvement in their length of productive life.