Associação fenotípica entre as características avaliadas por escore visual e a eficiência alimentar de touros jovens da raça Nelore

Abstract

Currently, the beef market has great importance in the Brazilian economy. In order for the beef production system to remain productive and profitable, it is necessary to ally genetic improvement tools, associating information on residual food intake (RFI) and characteristics evaluated by visual scores, guaranteeing more efficient animals within the quality standards that meet the needs of the market, with lower cost of production. However, the measurement of food efficiency has a high cost, limiting the number of studies carried out in Brazil on RFI, and when thinking about the association with characteristics of visual score this number is even smaller. Therefore, the objective of this study was to estimate the phenotypic associations between the residual food intake and the characteristics evaluated by EPMURAS. The information of 252 young bulls of the Nelore breed, pure of origin (PO), participants of Food efficiency tests carried out in the Technological Showcase of the Capim Branco experimental farm of the Federal University of Uberlândia (UFU) were considered. The characteristics of residual food intake (RFI), structure, precocity and muscularity (EPM, score) were evaluated. Descriptive analyzes, file formatting, data preparation, evaluation of the observations distributions and statistical analysis were performed using the Statistical Analysis System program. For the estimation of the Pearson correlation coefficients between RFI, structure, precocity and muscularity, the Statistical Analysis System program was also used, besides the Tukey test for the analysis of variance. There were no significant associations between RFI and structure (-0.07), precocity (0.01) and muscularity (-0.07). However, were (p>) 5%, being therefore not significant. It can be concluded from the present study that when selecting animals for RFI, there will be no change in the characteristics of structure, precocity and muscularity. However, there is a need for further studies on the subject to further validate these data.