Research

Background

Spring cereal crops such as wheat, barley, oats, and triticale are often seeded to provide silage or greenfeed for cattle. In 2020, almost 11 million acres of these crops (and others) were grown to ultimately provide feed for cattle.

While plant breeding efforts continue to make incremental advancements in agronomic traits such as improved grain yield and lodging resistance, an important consideration is how well certain varieties perform under regional environmental conditions and soil types which may be different from where the varieties were originally developed. Given Alberta’s vast variation in growing conditions, producers need regionally specific data to choose the best performing silage varieties for their needs.

Objectives

• Provide high quality, third-party yield and agronomic data on newly registered varieties used for silage in multiple locations throughout Alberta.
• Promote new variety adoption to Alberta farmers and ranchers.

What they are doing

The regional silage variety trials are grown in six locations across the province each year. In each location, up to 28 barley, oat, wheat and/or triticale varieties are grown in plots with three replications. Forage yield, relative days to maturity, and nutritional quality data are collected at harvest and amalgamated results from all locations are reported.

What they found

Results are reported in spring of each year in the Alberta Seed Guide.

What it means