Data comprising 4,959 lactations of 2,414 Brown-Swiss cows, daughters of 70 sires, from 51 herds, were used to estimate the variance component for sire x herd interaction on milk and fat yields and to verify the effect of this interaction on sire genetic evaluation, using the models that differed in the presence or not of the interaction term. The milk and fat yields were adjusted for two milkings, 305 days of lactation and age cow. Likelihood ratio test was used to verify the effectiveness of including a sire x herd interaction effect in the model. Averages for milk and fat yields were 6085.79 ± 1629.73 kg and 225.61 ± 60.44 kg, respectively. The proportion of the phenotypic variance due to sire x herd interaction was 0.4% for milk yield and 1% for fat yield. The heritability estimate was 0.38 to milk yield, using both models, and decreased from 0.40 to 0.39 for fat yield, when the model with interaction effect was considered. The likelihood function increased significantly with the inclusion of interaction in the model. The Spearman correlation was close to one for both traits, when all sires were considered. There was reduction of 1% in the estimate of accuracy of the breeding values for both traits, however the Pearson correlation estimated among the accuracy obtained for each model was close to one. No effects of sire x herd interaction on estimates of genetic and residual variance components, breeding values magnitude and sire order classification, for both traits, were observed.
accuracy; genetic evaluation; dairy cattle; variance components; genetic correlation; genotype environment interaction
