dairy herd. The quality of these forages greatly impacts profitability and performance, especially of the milking herd. Because of limited land base, labor, or personal preference, farmers may decide to purchase part or all of their herd’s forage needs. In other parts of the United States, corn silage and other chopped forages are sold and oftentimes delivered to the farm as needed. In Kentucky...

Effects of plant-bound condensed tannin (CT)-containing sainfoin vs. CT-free alfalfa (or low-CT alfalfa-sainfoin mixture), plant stage of maturity, and their interaction on enteric methane (CH4) emissions, diet digestibility, and N excretion were studied, using 8 ruminally cannulated beef heifers in 2 sequential short-term experiments (Exp. 1 and 2). In Exp. 1, first growth legumes were harvest...

. eight holstein cows in early lactating stage were used in a 4×4 change-over design within 4 periods of 21-d to determine the effects of alfalfa hay particle size and soybean oil supplementation on intake, digestibility, ruminal and blood metabolites, chewing activity, milk yield and compositions. four total mixed rations containing 20, 20 and 60% corn silage, alfalfa hay and concentrate respe...

Value-added traits of alfalfa are needed to provide farmers new high value profitable products. Processing alfalfa to obtain value added products includes three different fractionation methods: 1) wet fractionation; separation into juice fraction and a fiber fraction, 2) dry fractionation; separation into leaves and stems, and 3) fractionation by passage of the whole herbage through the digesti...

Two hundred forty crossbred yearling steers (836 ± 41 lb) were blocked by weight and used in a completely randomized design study intended to determine the effects of three levels of alfalfa hay (7.5, 10, and 12.5%) in steam-flaked corn (SFC) based finishing diets containing 25% wet distiller’s grains (WDG) derived from sorghum. Inclusion of WDG tended to increase DMI (P = 0.17), reduce ADG (P ...

This study was conducted to determine the chemical composition, digestibility, degradability and nutritive value of madder, Rubia tinctorum L.  and alfalfa Medicago sativa. using in vitro and in situ measurements. The mean values for OM, CP, NDF, ADF and EE were 892.5, 172.0, 306.5, 219.4 and 16.0 g/kg DM for madder hay, and 921.3, 141.4, 482.0, 361.1 and 6.50 g/kg DM for alfalfa hay, respectiv...