Wafered and Baled Alfalfa Hay Harvested at Different Stages of Maturity for Lactating Cows

Effect of yeast culture supplementation of alfalfa silage or alfalfa hay fed to lactating dairy cows

Ruminal in vitro degradability of protein in alfalfa harvested as standing forage or baled hay.

Eighty-nine samples, 45 of standing forage and 44 of baled hay, were collected from alfalfa harvested at various maturities over three cuttings each during 2 yr. Alfalfa was cut and conditioned mechanically; samples of standing forage were collected by removing bunches of forage from windrows and freeze-drying them. Forage was allowed to field cure and was harvested at an average 80% DM as smal...

Performance of lactating dairy cows fed either alfalfa silage or alfalfa hay as the sole forage.

Alfalfa was harvested from alternate windrows as 40% DM silage or hay in small rectangular bales and fed in two 12-wk 4 x 4 Latin square trials, each with 20 multiparous lactating cows (4 with ruminal cannulas). Diets contained (DM basis) 69 (trial 1) or 66% (trial 2) alfalfa, 26 to 33% high moisture corn, 1.3% minerals and vitamins, and about 1.6 Mcal of NEL/kg of DM. In trial 1, second-cuttin...

effects of alfalfa maturity and cutting times on availability of alfalfa hay protein for dairy cows

this experiment was conducted to consider the effects of maturity and cutting time on chemical composition and available protein content of alfalfa hay for dairy cows.. alfalfa hay harvested at two maturity stages (pre-bloom and early bloom) and two cutting times (morning and afternoon). available protein was predicted using nrc (2001) and dve/oeb (1994) models. in the nrc model (2001), alfalfa...

Digestive processes of dairy cows fed silages harvested at four stages of grass maturity.

The objective of this experiment was to quantify ruminal digestive processes that could help to identify factors limiting DMI when silages differing in grass maturity were fed to dairy cows. Four silages were harvested at 1-wk intervals from a primary growth of a timothy-meadow fescue sward, resulting in feeds with digestible OM content in DM (D-value) of 739, 730, 707, and 639 g/kg in the orde...