Alfalfa: How to Increase the Sugar Content

Описание: Sugar increase in alfalfa can contribute to a 5% increase in production of milk in cows. Find out how to improve sugar levels in your forage crops by watching this video.

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Full Video Transcript:


Narrator: Alfalfa is the most widely grown forage crop in Canada. Ruminants love to feed on alfalfa. This legume accounts for almost half of Canada’s total forage crop area.
Teams of Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada scientists in Quebec are working to improve various aspects of alfalfa, from its yields, and nutritional value,to its digestibility and environmental impact.
Research scientists Gaetan Tremblay and Gilles Belanger are studying the sugar content of alfalfa.
Gaetan Tremblay: Alfalfa has always, been used as a source of protein. But the important thing to know is that in order to utilize this protein efficiently from an environmental standpoint, you need to also provide the animal with a rapidly fermentable energy source, such as sugars.
Our goal was to increase the sugar content of alfalfa so that the microbes in the rumen could better utilize the protein in the alfalfa.

Gilles Belanger: We started by conducting a study under controlled conditions to see whether the sugar content in alfalfa increased at any point during the day.
Then we went into the field and basically did the same thing again, but under real-life conditions if you will, as regards the external climate and soil. We were able to determine that there was more sugar in the late afternoon.
Another important factor that we demonstrated is that leaving wide swaths when harvesting, about 80 percent of the cutting width, also results in a higher sugar content.
That can increase the sugar content by two to four percentage units. There are two major effects. First, it allows the dairy cow’s rumen, and thus the dairy cow itself, to better utilize nitrogen, and it boosts the cow’s voluntary consumption. Like us, cows have a bit of a sweet tooth. So if the forage is sweeter, the cow will eat more of it. Overall, these two effects combined allow the cow to produce up to five percent more milk.
Narrator: These results are important to the dairy and beef cattle sectors and could yield economic gains. Higher-energy forages can reduce grain use, stabilize production costs, lower nitrogen losses to the environment, and improve dairy production.
Cutting alfalfa in the late afternoon on a sunny day, and laying it in a wide swath.
That’s the ultimate recipe for sweeter forages, courtesy of our federal scientists and researchers.