Legume Forage Quality

Abstract

Legume forage quality research is now concerned not only with nutritive value of forage for ruminant animals, but the impact of these nutrients on environmental quality. If we are to move to a more sustainable agriculture worldwide, more legumes must be incorporated into animal production systems. The goal of forage legume breeders is to tailor legume nutritive value to the needs of the consuming animals. A generalized priority list for legume nutritive value research includes high fiber digestibility, low anti-quality compounds, appropriate condensed tannins, reduced nonprotein nitrogen, and high sulfur amino acids. Although breeders have regularly found a wide range in forage quality within a given legume species, very few varieties with proven forage quality advantages have been released. Yield and persistence issues have dominated forage legume breeding. Improvement in forage quality often is linked to a reduction in yield and/or persistence, and also frequently results in complex genotype X environment interactions. Transgenic technology has almost limitless potential for improving legume forage quality and environmental quality, but only if the public can be convinced that transgenics are an acceptable risk. Structural and functional roles of legume plant cell walls and their relationships to forage quality are poorly understood. Research on the basic processes of forage legume growth and the relationships between growth and forage composition should result in the development of more accurate simulation models, and transgenic technology can provide us with the tools to understand these basic processes.

Key Words:

• Anti-quality
• digestibility
• environmental quality
• nutritive value
• palatablility
• transgenic