Variance components of lean meat% estimated in Hungarian Landrace population

Abstract

Variance components of average backfat depth and lean meat percentage were estimated using 6081 Hungarian Landrace pigs from 18 stock-farms between 05.1997-05-1999. The applied softwares were PEST (Groeneveld, 1990) and VCE 4 (Groeneveld, 1998) respectively. Body weight year-month sex and stock-farm effects were considered as fixed effects. Meanwhile litter and additive genetic effects were treated as random effects. The received h2 and c2 values of average backfat depth and lean meat percentage were 0.26 and 0.19; 0.14 and 0.14. A strong negative genetic correlation coefficient was observed between the above mentioned treats (rg=-0.87). It can be concluded that the received heritability of the lean meat percentage was lower than expected compered with other findings for the same trait and with the heritability of the average backfat depth.