Parsons, David
- Department of Agricultural Research for Northern Sweden, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
Abstract
Predicting forage quality is important when marketing hay, predicting when to harvest a first cutting, moving animals onto pasture or to another pasture, predicting the quality of a silage, predicting how well a forage will perform in a given animal's ration, and increasingly, for use in soil nutrient management. This chapter gives the reader a historic analysis of forage quality analyses and why prediction of forage quality is more important than ever. Crude protein (CP) reflects a forage's potential to provide protein that herbivores require. Forage CP is based on a chemical analysis of the amount of nitrogen, which is the building block for amino acids that make up proteins. Increasingly, predicting total forage value requires that forage testing reports include estimates of nutritive value, including CP and one or more expressions of available energy (e.g. digestible dry matter, total digestible nutrients, digestible energy, and net energy).
Keywords
crude protein; digital age; forage quality; predicted values
Published in
Title: Forages: The Science of Grassland Agriculture : Volume 2
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
SLU Authors
UKÄ Subject classification
Animal and Dairy Science
Agricultural Science
Publication identifier
- DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119436669.ch38
- ISBN: 9781119436577
- eISBN: 9781119436669
Permanent link to this page (URI)
https://res.slu.se/id/publ/142862