Growing Your Own TMR: Selecting Forage Mixtures for Animal Perfromance

Background

Selection of the individual forage species that form the complex mixture is not a trivial task. Regional appropriateness, seed cost, forage yield, nutrient composition, and establishment ease are important characteristics. Different forage species also have different nutrient make-ups meaning that different mixtures have different nutrient availability when grazed or fed as silage to cattle.

Objectives

• To determine if it Is possible to design and grow forages that more closely meet the nutrient requirements of the cattle being fed and if such a strategy can improve forage production, reduce risk, and improve return on investment.

What they will do

These researchers want to see if they can use forage blends to better match the nutritional needs of beef cattle. Over 4 consecutive years thew will grow a diverse and simple forage mixture that has been formulated for animal target nutrition at 3 different locations. They will compare this to a control field with barley. They will record environmental conditions, soil samples, and plant nutrient analysis throughout the growing and feeding season.

In the first trial they will silage the different forage mixtures as at different stages of maturity in laboratory silos and evaluate silage quality. They will then use these samples in vitro to determine how they are affected by rumen fermentation.

In a second trial steers will receive a control diet with 60% barley silage, 40/20 barley/complex forage mix silage, 20/40 barley/complex forage mix silage, or 60% complex forage mix silage.  Animal health and performance parameters will be recorded. In the second year they will do a second backgrounding trial in which diets will include barley silage, increased inclusion of forage, a maximum forage inclusion with other forages (eg. straw), or maximum forage inclusion with other non-forage fibre sources (eg. oat hulls)

Finally they will do a heifer study with growing heifers where they will graze standing barley or a complex forage mixture. Forage, methane, and animal performance will be measured. A custom economics model will be developed to analyze risk/reward.

Implications

This will provide more information on forage mixtures and a formula for producers to follow if they wish to also select forage mixtures on the basis of animal performance.