The aim of the research is to study the productivity and nutritional value of agrophytocenoses formed on the basis of a sparsely distributed annual culture of Sudanese grass in the conditions of Northwestern Russia, when harvesting for forage purposes. The research method included conducting a field experiment. The scientific novelty lies in the fact that for the first time in the conditions of the Northwest of Russia, the best grain mixtures are identified, created on the basis of a sparsely distributed annual culture of Sudanese grass in mono- and bi-crops with peas, vetch, spring rapeseed and oats to obtain sustainable yields of green mass. The research was carried out in accordance with the methodological guidelines for conducting field experiments at the All-Russian Williams Fodder Research Institute. The venue is the experimental field of the Northwestern Research Institute for Dairy and Grassland Farming – a separate subdivision of the Federal State Budgetary Institution of Science “Vologda Research Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences”. The scheme of the experiment included 10 variants in three-fold repetition. The area of the accounting plot is 14.0 m2. The following varieties of annual crops were used to create crops: Sudanese grass variety “Chishminskaya rannaya”, field peas variety “Volgodsky usatyi”, spring vetch variety “Lgovskaya-22”, rapeseed spring variety “Bizon” and oats variety “Yakov”. The tillage system is generally accepted for the region. During the season, according to productive indicators from 1 ha, 28.2–40.0 tons of green mass, 4.8–8.1 tons of dry mass, 4.1–6.5 thousand feed units, 0.75–1.16 tons of crude protein were obtained; the output of metabolic energy was 49.2–80.8 GJ. In the first mowing, bean-cereal mixtures of variants 2, 4, 5, 7–10 stood out in terms of yield, which exceeded the control by 1.1–2.9 t/ha or 30.5–84.3%. In the second mowing, the single-species sowing of Sudanese grass provided the highest yield – 4.7 t/ha of SV. The highest crude protein content of 20.9 and 21.3% was obtained in the vegetable mass of legume-cereal mixtures in the first mowing of variants 3 and 5. The scope of application is agricultural enterprises of the Northwest of Russia
Keywords
oats, Sudanese grass, field peas, spring vetch, spring rapeseed, mono- and bi-crops, productivity and nutritional value of feed