2024年7月23日 · Harvesting alfalfa silage involves specific steps to ensure optimal preservation of nutrients and quality, which are crucial for maintaining the health and productivity of livestock. Here’s how alfalfa silage is typically harvested:

As little as 5% moldy silage mixed in with 95% good silage will reduce animal intake by 0.1 to 0.2% of body weight. The reduced intake means less weight gain or less milk production. Lastly, monitor moisture content of the silage frequently during feedout.

Alfalfa (Medicago sativa) is a common silage crop, which has found usage as forage material for organic laying hens (Hammershoj and Steenfeldt, 2015). Even though alfalfa is better known as dried alfalfa meal for egg layers, it can also be fed as silage.

Alfalfa requires well-drained soils with high fertility and pH. Compared with alfalfa dry hay, alfalfa silage typically preserves more nutrients due to reduced leaf losses. In addition, weather damage is easier to avoid since it requires less time wilting on the field to …

2023年3月8日 · Both alfalfa and grass usually provide more energy and protein when harvested as silage than as hay. Direct-cutting of hay-crop silages avoids extended weather damage and leaf shattering; even wilting hay-crop silages may result in …

2024年12月1日 · Lactobacillus plantarum, a type of hemofermenter, has been shown to improve alfalfa silage quality by reducing DM loss (from 13.8 % to 8.71 %), lowering pH (4.88 vs 5.22), and decreasing non-protein nitrogen content (from 12.3 % to 9.19 %), while also enhancing cellobiase, pectinase, and protease activities (Chen et al., 2022a).

Our results indicated that alfalfa silage improved meat quality more effectively in terms of water-holding capacity, drip loss, and marbling score. Besides, an alfalfa silage diet can affect the level of fatty acids and amino acids in pork.

2022年7月1日 · Alfalfa silage quality index integrated milk yield and seven crucial silage parameters. The new index is capable of evaluating and grading silage based on the index score. The new index applies to the dairy industry in evaluating alfalfa silage quality accurately.

2021年10月12日 · Alfalfa silage is one of the main roughages in the production of dairy cow, which can provide nutrition with high quality to improve milk quality and production. Sucrose additions have been widely used to improve the silage quality.

Over the last decade, scientists at the USDA-Agricultural Research Service, the University of Wisconsin, Michigan State University and Penn State University have been developing reliable methods for establishing alfalfa in high yielding silage corn.