engleski

Designing of forage systems for improved sustainability of cattle farming and agriculture

The majority of Croatian arable land is destined to fodder and forage production. Modern feeding of arable produced feeds enabled the probably greatest livestock productivity in history. However, arable farming consumes much fossil fuel from finite resources and ruins biodiversity, while heavy farm machinery causes soil compaction and amplified drought effects. The aim of the work is to answer if we can make our cattle farming and agriculture more sustainable by turning cattle farming into more grazing and less feeding of concentrates and silage maize? Research has shown that a shift to grazing during the grazing season and feeding forages only during the off-pasture season would certainly improve the biodiversity in the agricultural area and would make our environment and landscape more beautiful. Improvements in soil quality are also expected. Since only about half of forages have to be conserved for the off-pasture season, the consumption of fossil fuels would also be decreased. Findings synthesized from the cited literature, and obtained from the authors’ projections indicate that the shift to solely grazing during the grazing season and feeding solely on forages during the off-pasture season would require more than a double agricultural land resource if there is intended to maintain the contemporary production volume. The need for an increase in forage production area comes mainly because of greater total feed consumption per head, due to prolonged feeding of beef cattle and lesser milk yield per dairy cows, and somewhat lesser yields of perennial forages when compared to silage maize. However, an abundant and underutilized perennial grasslands area of Croatia could probably partially offset the needed increase in the forage production area. Therefore, appears that we could gain many benefits if the future forage systems are designed more rely on pastures and perennial forages on arable land instead of contemporary annual forages and grains. The main findings derived from the presented synthesis are partially based on the literature review of published field research and partially based on the authors’ theoretical projections and therefore cannot be regarded as reliable without field testing and measurements on live animals in Croatian conditions.

forage system ; agriculture ; sustainability ; livestock farming

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