AND INTRODUCTION In the Western United States poisonous plants are estimated to cost the animal industry more than 200 million dollars annually. The majority of these losses are attributed to livestock grazing on rangelands. Little has been done to determine the costs of livestock poisoned by contaminated feeds which are probably more frequent and costly. Grazing livestock generally avoid eatin...

Both the anti-nutritional and beneficial effects of secondary compounds in a range of temperate and tropical forages have been reviewed. Major secondary compounds in temperate and tropical forage plants occur in the phenolic fraction and include condensed and hydrolysable tannins, phenolic monomers and lignin. Condensed tannins (CT) bind to plant protein by pH-reversible hydrogen bonding. In te...

An experiment was conducted to determine animal performance and gain/ha of beef steers (mean initial wt.: 241 kg) grazing a conventional sorghum x sudan hybrid (C) versus its near isogenic brown midrib (BMR) variety. The experiment was conducted during the summers of 1999 and 2000 in the Texas Panhandle. During both summers 8 pasture plots (2.2 ha) were blocked by location and randomly assigned...

A field trial was conducted on 5 farms to determine the effect of feeding distillers dried grains (DDGS) on milk production in the southern dairy region of Chile. The trial was repeated on each farm during winter (July and August; primarily silage-based rations) and spring (November and December; pasture-based rations). Only for one farm could the treatments be applied concurrently by feeding d...

A method has been developed to prepare fresh forages for in sacco and in vitro incubation by freezing and mincing to achieve a particle size distribution of dry matter (DM) similar to in vivo conditions. The method is described and data presented to indicate losses of nitrogen (N) during in sacco digestion and net yield of ammonia from proteolysis in vitro for 22 fresh and conserved forages. Gr...

Forages are a necessary component of diets for lactating dairy cows because they provide coarse fiber needed to optimize rumen function. However, forages alone provide insufficient nutrients to achieve high milk yield and they must be supplemented with other feed ingredients. Because forage quality is highly variable, their quality must be assessed before diets are formulated. Forages have been...

The majority of ruminant livestock production occurs in temperate grasslands where animals are allowed to graze or are fed harvested forages (i.e., hays or silages). As a result, forages comprise 50 to 90% of total feed consumed by ruminants during their production cycle (Reid and Jung, 1982). In the U.S., beef cattle production is often viewed as an intensive enterprise because of finishing ca...

There is a tendency to consider forages largely in terms of their energy value or TDN. However, the feeding value of forage is actually a more complex function of its nutrient composition, chemical-physical characteristics of its fiber, acceptability (palatability), and associative interactions it might have with other dietary ingredients. Because forages are not usually cost-competitive with c...

The nutritional image of bovine milk fat has suffered for years because of the association of saturated fatty acids and coronary heart disease. Thus the alteration of fatty acid composition has been a long-term strategy. Forages, even though containing a relatively low level of lipids, are the cheapest and often the major source of beneficial unsaturated fatty acids in ruminant diets. Recent pr...