Improved prediction using genomic relationships for farmed red deer in New Zealand

ABSTRACT The deer industry in New Zealand has made notable genetic progress in recent decades. Initially based around live weight and velvet antler, deer are now selected on several traits including carcass composition, reproduction, and disease resistance within DEERSelect, the industry performance recording system in New Zealand. Due to its low cost and manageable logistics for deer, the genotyping‐by‐sequencing technology has replaced DNA microsatellites for parentage assignment. Since 2015 more than 60,000 animals in the national herd have been genotyped using this technology. Genomic information, however, is not yet fully exploited as evaluations currently only use pedigree information to estimate genetic merit. To assess the benefits of using genomic information, we compare pedigree, genomic and single‐step genomic BLUP approaches for weaning weight, yearling weight and velvet weight at 2 years of age, in red deer from New Zealand. Using forward validation, we estimate the prediction accuracy for 56,178 animals (red and red × wapiti crossbreds) born between 1995 and 2022. We show that incorporating genomic information explicitly improves prediction accuracy by at least 15% in three key industry traits, allowing better ranking of animals across birth years. We recommend the incorporation of genomic information in the industry evaluations performed by DEERSelect.