2021 Autumn Seed Catalogue

26 FORAGE CROPS FORAGE RAPE LUCERNE EMERALD • AKELA • GORILLA Suitable for Autumn/Winter grazing, and usually grown in mixture with stubble turnips. Sowings are made as soon as harvest is cleared to lengthen the time for establishment and growth. Forage Rape has the advantage of being a very fast- growing crop, suitable for grazing by sheep or cattle. An ideal catch crop for boosting midsummer forage production for livestock farmers when planted in the spring, it is suitable for fattening lambs in the autumn/winter. Forage rape extends the grazing season in the autumn and is superb for flushing ewes. It is better to strip graze to avoid excessive wastage. HUNGRY GAP For later use, Hungry Gap’s exceptional winter hardiness will ensure crops can be used in January and February. It is best sown in June or July and its growth habit is kale-like in appearance. PEARCE MAIN VARIETIES: A deep rooted, perennial legume, Lucerne is ideally suited to light, free draining soils with a pH of 7. The crop is usually sown between April and August at a depth of 1 cm and a rate of 8-10 kilos per acre. Lucerne is usually treated as a 5 year conservation crop and cut 3-4 times. It is important to leave a minimum 10 cm stubble to speed regrowth and not scalp the plant. The plants usually have a protein content of around 18% and their higher fibre levels complement items like maize silage in a ration. Lucerne has a very good yield potential of 13 tonnes of dry matter/ha/year over the first 2 years. The inclusion of Lucerne silage in dairy cow diets has been shown to improve forage intake, and increase output of milk protein, with no change in milk fat. The benefits together with lower forage production costs when compared with grass silage should help to improve margin/litre of milk produced. Yet in spite of all of these important attributes, ruminant livestock producers have been reluctant to grow Lucerne silage and the area in the UK is at present small.