An assessment of the relative importance of specific traits for the genetic improvement of nutritive value in dairy pasture

Abstract

There have been few successful programmes to select forage plants with improved nutritive value for dairy cattle, despite the implications of improved forage quality for dairy production. Part of this lack of progress has been attributed to differences in opinion on the relative importance of improving individual traits relating to nutritive value. This paper reports the use of the Delphi survey technique to obtain an estimate of the priority for improvement of individual nutritive value traits among a large group of respondents. The Delphi technique has been used previously to rank nutritive value traits in forages for liveweight gain and wool production (Wheeler and Corbett, 1989, Grass an..