Conservation Reserve Program Hay Quality from Producer Submissions to a Commercial Laboratory in Central Nebraska

The Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) sets aside hectares to be permanent grassland and keeps those acres out of rotation for agricultural use. In drought conditions, these acres open to emergency haying and grazing. CRP hay is harvested at the end of the primary nesting season, mid to late summer, therefore this is a very mature product for stored forage. Many beef cow producers in the Midwest feed CRP hay in the last third of gestation until cattle can be turned out for spring grazing. Data was obtained from CRP hay samples to evaluate forage nutritive value and supplementation needs relative to gestating beef cow requirements. Crude protein, ADF, aNDF, and NDFD48 ranges and means all indicated that overall CRP hay forage quality is poor. In fact, 90.07% (n = 508) of the samples would require producers feeding gestating beef cows to provide extra supplementation based on crude protein, TDN, or both. These results show that if beef producers must feed CRP hay, then laboratory analysis will be a valuable tool for determining the precise level of supplementation required to meet beef cow nutritional requirements. However, these results paired with recent wildlife management studies show that grazing at reduced stocking rates during nesting season may be the best alternative to optimize forage quality utilization on CRP acres as well as provide the benefit of more variable grassland habitat to increase avian species diversity on these lands

Accuracy and Precision of Near Infra-red Spectroscopy (NIRS) versus Wet Chemistry in Forage Analysis

Near Infra-red Spectroscopy (NIRS) is an attractive option for forage analysis. NIRS is less labor intensive, nondestructive, rapid, environmentally friendly and provides accurate and precise results. However, many nutritionists are quick to brush off NIRS, citing ‘poor accuracy’. We evaluated the accuracy and precision of dry matter (DM), crude protein (CP), acid detergent fiber (ADF), and neutral detergent fiber (NDF) of 33 National Forage Testing Association (NFTA) proficiency test (PT) alfalfa hay samples analyzed by NIRS in 7 NIRS Forage and Feed Testing Consortium (NIRSC) member laboratories. The reference method averages (RMA), used to evaluate the NIRS results, were based on the wet chemistry results reported by numerous laboratories participating in the corresponding NFTA proficiency testing rounds. Thus, this study is a robust comparison of NIRS determined results with the corresponding wet chemistry results, which is still a “gold standard” to many nutritionists. These results demonstrate that when NIRS calibrations are developed using good science and applied properly, NIRS is as accurate as wet chemistry in forage nutritional analysis. Further, both intra-laboratory and inter-laboratory precision of NIRS methods are superior to wet chemistry method