Economic weights as a tool for sustainable livestock farming

The livestock farming synthesizes many aspects which should be taken into account when economic weights are calculated. The most common approach to calculate the economic weights is a bioeconomic modelling of the production system. Economically important traits are defined thought the modelling of herd structure using the Markov processes and iterative procedure, taking the total profit as the criterion of the economic efficiency. Marginal economic weights are expressed as a numerical approximation of the partial derivation of the profit function. These are standardized through genetic standard deviations and then expressed relative to the certain trait or as a proportion on the sum all of traits. Except of the production traits, the functional traits (health, reproduction, survival) and feed efficiency traits are very important for the sustainable and competitive animal production. Next to the economic also the environmental benefit (reduction of emissions through more effective utilisation of feed), ensuring the animal welfare (lower mastitis and claw diseases incidence) and finally the food security and sustainable development of the domestic agriculture should be mentioned. To calculate economic weights, the program package ECOWEIGHT (for cattle and for sheep) can be usefully applied. At present, the modulefor pigs as a part of the program package is under development.