AgricultureID

Forage and pasture crops

Crops grown to be eaten by livestock, either grazed in place or cut and conserved. The defining difference from every other group is that the harvest is repeated and partial: the crop is expected to regrow, and how it is harvested determines whether it does.

An agricultural grouping. Not a taxon and not claimed to be one — cereals span two families, pulses and oilseeds overlap, and the grouping is about what the crop is grown for.

The yield is what the animal eats

Forage yield measured in the field is not the yield that matters. What reaches the animal is reduced by selection, trampling, field losses at cutting and losses in conservation, and a management change that raises standing biomass can lower utilised yield. This is the group’s central measurement problem and it has no counterpart in a crop sold by the tonne.

Regrowth comes from somewhere specific

Every forage species regrows from a particular structure — tillers at the base in grasses, crown buds in alfalfa and red clover, stolons in white clover — and defoliation management is really management of that structure. Cutting or grazing below it removes the plant’s capacity to recover, which is why residual height matters more here than removal rate.

Quality falls as the crop grows

Digestibility declines as a forage matures and stem replaces leaf, so yield and quality move in opposite directions and the harvest date is a choice between them. That trade-off is the group’s defining agronomic decision, and it is why forage is cut at a growth stage rather than at maturity.

Grass and legume together

Sown swards commonly combine a grass and a legume, and the two interact: the legume fixes nitrogen the grass uses, while nitrogen fertiliser suppresses the legume both directly and by letting the grass shade it. The nitrogen decision and the legume decision are therefore a single decision.

Conservation is a fermentation or a drying race

Forage kept for winter is either dried to hay or fermented as silage, and both are contests against the crop’s own biology. Silage needs sugar, exclusion of air and rapid consolidation; hay needs drying weather. Species differ in how well they suit each — a high-protein, low-sugar legume ferments poorly and a brittle-leaved one loses leaf in hay.

Some hazards belong to the animal, not the plant

This is the only crop group where a plant compound is a management constraint because of what it does to the consumer: bloat on high-clover swards, ryegrass staggers from an endophyte, oestrogenic isoflavones in red clover, dicoumarol in spoiled sweet clover hay. None of these makes the crop unusable, and all of them change how it is fed.

What this is not

  • Cover crops are grown for what they do to the soil and are usually not harvested at all; the same species appears in both groups when it is used both ways.
  • Cereals cut whole for silage are being used as forage, which is a use rather than a change of group.