Forage availability is sometimes limited because of poor growing conditions or because of insufficient land base on individual farms. In addition, forage fiber can limit feed intake, particularly for high producing cows, and forage quality is highly variable. Therefore, there is continual interest in alternatives to forages in diets for dairy cows. Decreasing the forage content of diets require...

Fenugreek (Trigonella foenum-graecum L.) is used as medicinal plant in many Asian countries and has been reported to have forage quality similar to alfalfa. Fenugreek is an annual crop and may have the potential to diversify forage production systems in the central High Plains. This study evaluated forage dry matter (DM) production and the nutritive value of three fenugreek cultivars as influen...

Improvement in stress tolerance of forage and turf grasses is a major breeding goal. Most forage and some turf grasses are grown on marginal lands under stressful environments with minimal inputs. In contrast, current high-input turf grass production systems such as golf courses and lawns are expensive and often environmentally unfriendly. Cultivars with improved stress tolerance are necessary ...

The sorghum-sudangrass hybrid (Sorghum bicolor x S. sudanense) is an important forage crop. However, little is known about the genetic mechanisms related to forage yield and the 4 forage yield component traits in this forage crop. In this study, a linkage map was constructed with 124 assigned SSR markers using an F2 mapping population derived from the crossing of sorghum Tx623A and sudangrass S...

field trials. The use of row-column analysis or neighbor analysis has been shown to increase the precision of a Spatial analyses of yield trials are a powerful method of adjusting large number of grain yield trials (Cullis and Gleeson, treatment means for spatial variation and improving statistical precision of mean estimation. Because yield trials are typically repeated 1989; Cullis and Gleeso...

Planning is essential to the successful conversion of conventional to organic farming. Currently, advisors base planning on personal experience and expertise, historical and market data. The process can be time consuming and expensive. A new software package designed to support this process has been developed. The software enables the user to construct conversion scenarios for a farm over a per...

Cattle 's grazing of the locoweed Wahweap milkvetch (Astragalus lentiginosus var. wabweapensis) was evaluated on desert and foothill winter range during the winter of 1986 to 1987. Dry, dead stalks of Wahweap milkvetch that had grown in 1985 and 1986 made up 15% of cattle diets overall, and 24% of diets when cattle grazed gravelly benches where it was abundant. Nutrit ional quality of Wahweap m...

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...

Potential competition between native and domestic herbivores is a major consideration influencing the management and conservation of native herbivores in rangeland ecosystems. In grasslands of the North American Great Plains, black-tailed prairie dogs (Cynomys ludovicianus) are widely viewed as competitors with cattle but are also important for biodiversity conservation due to their role in cre...

The forage maturation hypothesis (FMH) proposes that ungulate migration is driven by selection for high forage quality. Because quality declines with plant maturation, but intake declines at low biomass, ungulates are predicted to select for intermediate forage biomass to maximize energy intake by following phenological gradients during the growing season. We tested the FMH in the Canadian Rock...