This study investigated meiotic recombination in two breeds of cattle by comparing phased SNP haplotypes in sire-offspring pairs. The positions and number of recombination events were identified. The number of recombination events varies between individuals and is a heritable trait. A genome-wide association analysis identified quantitative trait loci (QTL) associated with variation in the number of recombination events. Regions that had more recombination events than expected were identified in both breeds, and many of these hotspots were in common. Recombination is important biologically because it is the mechanism for reassembling paternal and maternal alleles. Recombination impacts the accuracy of imputation, a commonly-used approach to infer the genotypes of some individuals based on genotypes of others.