Farm Genetics Back-Breeding To Save Outstanding Bloodlines!

Every now and then in the farm, we discover outstanding outcome of a breeding program which we would like to keep and multiply.
This is true with Dairy Goats which produce a lot of milk for a long period of time, a hen which lays a lot of eggs or a fighting cock which wins all of its fights in the pit.
This moment, to a farmer, is just like discovering a Mother Lode of Gold because it is a formula to success.
The first action that the farmer takes is to identify the sire and the dam or the rooster and the hen and place them back again in the breeding pen to produce more of the outstanding offsprings.
However, considering the fact that the parents of the outstanding animals would soon age and die, farmers resort to “back-breeding'” which involves breeding back the male offsprings to the dam or hen and the female offsprings to the sire or broodcock.
The result of the first stage of the “back-breeding” theoretically produces offsprings which are 3/4 of the genetic traits of the parents and the second stage produces 7/8 offsprings.
We usually do back-breeding up to 30/32, meaning the back-breeding was done 4 times to attain an almost perfect copy of the dam or sire both phenotype and genotype.
At the end of the fourth stage of “Back-Breeding,” the offsprings from the sire/rooster side could again be bred to those from the dam/hen side to “replicate” the genetic combination which produced the outstanding animals.
It is a delicate process because you have to watch out for abnormalities in some of the offsprings.
Just retain the best and cull the rest.

#PracicalFarmGenetics!