information on animal daily forage needs is essential for an estimation of rangeland grazing capacity. accordingly, weight and animal unit equivalent (aue) for each individual class of animal should be determined. live weights of baloochi sheep as based on average live weights of 3 and 4 year old ewes were determined. five herds of baloochi breed sheep were selected for the task. in each herd, ...

1. It is generally assumed that animals compensate for a declining diet quality with increasing food intake. Differences in the response to decreasing forage quality in herbivores have been postulated particularly between cattle (ruminants) and horses (hindgut fermenters). However, empirical tests for both assumptions in herbivorous mammals are rare. 2. We collected data on voluntary food intak...

for use in sustainable forage-livestock production systems in the southern Great Plain region. Stocker cattle production in portions of southern Great Plains Pigeonpea is a summer legume crop grown for grain depends on wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) and warm-season perennial grasses. Nutrient supply is limited in both quantity and quality from in the tropics and subtropics. The crop ranks sixth i...

Brown midrib, a genetic mutation in several grassy species, reduces lignin content in the total plant parts. Lignin is mostly indigestible but also plays an important role in plant rigidity. During the past several years the brown midrib (bmr) trait has been incorporated into forage sorghum, sudangrass, and corn. The results have been significant for the most part. IVTD values for bmr sorghum h...

1Animal Sciences Department, NDSU 2Carrington Research Extension Center, NDSU 3Hettinger Research Extension Center, NDSU 4Department of Animal Science, South Dakota State University The objective of this study was to evaluate the effect of feeding different levels of forage during the finishing phase of beef production. Three different finishing diets of 20, 30 and 40 percent forage were fed to...

Three experiments were conducted to evaluate the effects of diet and monensin on performance, digestibility, and methane production in steers fed forage-based diets. In Exp. 1, 72 individually fed steers (300 ± 25 kg) were used in a randomized block design arranged as 2 separate 2 × 2 factorials with two common treatments, thus 6 diets were fed with 12 steers per treatment. Factors included hig...

Intake and digestibility trials were conducted with sheep to evaluate the effect of adding various levels of a typical fibrous grass forage (neutral detergent fiber, NDF = 68%) to a high quality, low fiber (NDF = 22%) brassica forage. Four forage rape:orchardgrass hay diets (0, 40, 70, 100% rape content on a dry matter basis) were fed to groups of six Polled-Dorset crossbred growing wether lamb...

A successful honey bee forager tells her nestmates the location of good nectar and pollen with the waggle dance, a symbolic language that communicates a distance and direction. Because bees are adept at scouting out profitable forage and are very sensitive to energetic reward, we can use the distance that bees communicate via waggle dances as a proxy for forage availability, where the further t...

Quantifying the nutritional quality of forage fish is integral for understanding upper trophic levels as forage fish are the dominant prey for top predator fish, marine mammals, and sea birds. Many existing reports documenting body composition of forage species are not comparable due to confounding effects. This study systematically assessed the variability in proximate composition and energy c...

Using red kangaroos Macropus rufus Desmarest, a large (>20 kg) marsupial herbivore, we compared the digestive capabilities of juveniles with those of mature, non-lactating females on high-quality forage (chopped lucerne Medicago sativa hay) of 43+/-1% neutral-detergent fibre (NDF) and poorer quality, high-fibre forage (chopped oaten Avena sativa hay) of 64+/-1% NDF. On chopped lucerne apparent ...