Evaluation of polycrop mixtures for swath grazing, soil health and economics

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It has been reported that extending the grazing season for beef cattle production has economic andenvironmental benefits. As such, swath grazing of annual forages during fall and winter is increasinglypracticed by the Canadian cow-calf sector. Swath gazing of annual forages late in the year can provide largequantities of forage and high nutritive value feed. Recently, there is considerable interest in the use of polycrop(cocktails, cover crops) mixtures for swath grazing and our research attempts to address producer andindustries concerns associated with what species to include and number of species in the mixture required indifferent ecoregions (soil zones). Therefore, the proposed project will demonstrate the agronomic, grazing, soiland economic benefits of extending the grazing season using polycrop blends of differing annual crop species.Selected species for the mixture include forage cereals, legumes, brassicas, grasses and herbs. This project willbe implemented at University of Saskatchewan's Livestock and Forage Centre of Excellence (LFCE), ClavetSK (Dark Brown soil zone) and Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, Swift Current Research & DevelopmentCentre, Swift Current SK (Brown soil zone). In order to investigate the potential benefits of polycrop blends,three treatments will be considered: Control - annual monocrop oat forage; Simple polycrop mixturecontaining four annual forage crop species; and Complex polycrop mixture containing eight different annualforage crop species. Detailed evaluation on forage biomass and nutritive value, grazing animal performance,soil physical and chemical properties, and system economics will be collected and analyzed. The outcomesfrom this project will fill the existing research gaps, and recommendations will be made on the use of annualpolycrop mixtures in different ecoregions to extend the grazing season, relative to a monocrop oat forage.