Resilience: reference measures based on longer-term consequences are needed to unlock the potential of precision livestock farming technologies for quantifying this trait

selection of animals based on both the phenotype and the genotype (via genomic selection). Here we develop a rationale for how the long-term consequences of resilience can be assessed in dairy cows, and how this allows to evaluate and benchmark PLF-based proxies. To this end, we start from the assumption that resilience mechanisms must provide longer-term benefits that can be measured at the end of life, on which animals can be ranked within farm. Those benefits may include increased productive lifespan and reduced frequency of health and reproductive problems. The relative resilience rank, that implicitly takes the farm environment into account, can be used as a reference value for validating new measures of resilience. Three obvious candidates for a relative resilience rank are productive lifespan, the number of disease events, and the ability to re-calve.