Yield, Quality and Competition Parameters of Forage Rape

Abstract

Growing lots of crops probably would be restricted by global warming in the close future, necessary precautions should be developed. Because of its rapid growing ability and could be growing in winter period without irrigation, research activities, recently, were focused on forage rape to keep and also increase high quality roughage production. Forage rape can be grown alone, as well as grown with rye, oat, barley and annual ryegrass as binary mixture. This study was carried out in coastal area of Central Black Sea Region in Turkey during the 2015-16 and 2016-17 vegetation periods for two years. In the study forage rape (FR) cv Lenox, Hungarian vetch (HV) cv Tarm Beyazi-98, common vetch (CV) cv Nilufer, forage pea (FP) cv ozkaynak and oat (O) cv Faikbey were used. Forage rape was planted with the other ones as binary mixture (50:50), as well as pure stand of crops. Aim of the study was to determine forage yield and some quality traits, and to investigate competition between the crops. In the consequence of this study it was determined that hay yields of all mixtures were superior to pure stands of the same crops. Competition was effected by crops and years. Though, all mixtures had advantage compare to pure stands (LER>1 and ACYL positive), consider together hay and CP yields, ADF and NDF ratios, especially FR+FP, FR+HV and FR+CV mixtures were superior to the other treatments. To increase high quality forage production these mixtures can be recommended in similar environmental conditions.