High plant diversity stimulates foraging motivation in grazing herbivores

Feng, Chao Yang; Ding, Shuaishuai; Zhang, Tianyuan; Li, Zhiqiang; Wang, Deli; Liu, Chen; Sun, Jijia; Peng, Fugang

doi:10.1016/j.baae.2015.09.004

Cited by 16 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 33 publications

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“…The authors attributed treatment differences to improved nutrition and increase in forage intake of cows grazing on diverse pastures. Experimental evidence also indicates that forage species diversity increased food intake in sheep, especially at the latter phase of the meal (Wang et al, 2010;Feng et al, 2016). Improved sheep, goat and cattle performance has also been reported in mixed grasslegume swards relative to monocultures (Rutter, 2006;Chapman et al, 2007), and in heifers grazing combinations of three different legumes relative to legume monocultures (Lagrange et al, 2020).…”

Section: Ruminant Production and Phytochemical Diversitymentioning

confidence: 87%

Designing Diverse Agricultural Pastures for Improving Ruminant Production Systems

Distel

Arroquy

Lagrange

et al. 2020

Front. Sustain. Food Syst.

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Pasture-based production systems represent a significant sustainable supplier of animal source foods worldwide. For such systems, mounting evidence highlights the importance of plant diversity on the proper functioning of soils, plants and animals. A diversity of forages and biochemicals -primary and secondary compounds-at appropriate doses and sequences of ingestion, may lead to benefits to the animal and their environment that are greater than grazing monocultures and the isolated effects of single chemicals.Here we review the importance of plant and phytochemical diversity on animal nutrition, welfare, health, and environmental impact while exploring some novel ideas about pasture design and management based on the biochemical complexity of traditional and non-traditional forage sources. Such effort will require an integration and synthesis on the morphology, ecophysiology, and biochemistry of traditional and non-traditional forage species, as well as on the foraging behavior of livestock grazing diverse pasturelands. Thus, the challenge ahead entails selecting the "right" species combination, spatial aggregation, distribution and management of the forage resource such that productivity and stability of plant communities and ecological services provided by grazing are enhanced. We conclude that there is strong experimental support for replacing simple traditional agricultural pastures of reduced phytochemical diversity with multiple arrays of complementary forage species that enable ruminants to select a diet in benefit of their nutrition, health and welfare, whilst reducing the negative environmental impacts caused by livestock production systems.

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Section: Ruminant Production and Phytochemical Diversitymentioning

confidence: 87%

Designing Diverse Agricultural Pastures for Improving Ruminant Production Systems

Distel

Arroquy

Lagrange

et al. 2020

Front. Sustain. Food Syst.

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“…Our approach offers methodologies to supplement the experimental studies of how herbivores respond to the variability of vegetation, which has usually been in highly controlled situations. There, techniques have included such manipulations as patches being established, thus offering animals different plant morphologies [ 23 , 28 , 46 , 47 , 48 , 49 ].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…These techniques are based on the occurrence of species and do not involve the measurement of species biomass. Their relevance to the feeding ecology would, therefore, be questionable if diet selection were purely based on maximizing intake rate but it is clear that diets of herbivores, such as sheep, “contain a mixture of food items with apparent disregard for the intake rate each offers” [ 8 ] and, indeed, plant species richness itself has been shown experimentally to influence voluntary intake [ 21 , 22 , 23 , 24 ]. While the available biomass of forage is clearly important, the species richness of semi-natural or species-rich grassland could be another determinant of sheep foraging behavior, and this is the focus of our investigation.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sheep in Species-Rich Temperate Grassland: Combining Behavioral Observations with Vegetation Characterization

Hall

Bunce

Arney

et al. 2020

Animals

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Foraging behavior of livestock in species-rich, less intensively managed grassland communities will require different methodologies from those appropriate in floristically simple environments. In this pilot study on sheep in species-rich grassland in northern Estonia, foraging behavior and the plant species of the immediate area grazed by the sheep were registered by continually-recording Go-Pro cameras. From three days of observation of five sheep (706 animal-minutes), foraging behavior was documented. Five hundred and thirty-six still images were sampled, and a plant species list was compiled for each. Each plant species was assigned a score indicating its location, in the ecophysiological sense, on the main environmental gradient. The scores of the plant species present were averaged for each image. Thus, the fine structure of foraging behavior could be studied in parallel with the vegetation of the precise area being grazed. As expected, there was considerable individual variation, and we characterized foraging behavior by quantifying the patterns of interspersion of grazing and non-grazing behaviors. This combination of behavior recording and vegetation classification could enable a numerical analysis of the responses of grazing livestock to vegetation conditions.

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“…It has been reported that if there was a preferred plant species in the feed mixture, more roughage would be eaten by ewes (Dumont et al 2000). A recent study also indicated that forage intake of livestock could be increased by forage mix with high or poor quality (Feng et al 2016). Moreover, based on the nutritional value of the roughage species, higher CP and lower fiber contents in the roughage combinations were probably another reason for the greater roughage intake of ewes in G4 and G5 treatments as compared to other treatments, especially in the first 10 days of the feeding trial.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Forage intake and weight gain of ewes is affected by roughage mixes during winter in northeastern China

Yang

Wang

Yuan

et al. 2016

Animal Science Journal

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We studied the effect of dietary roughage species and their combinations on forage intake and growth rate of ewes during winter in a pastoral-farming area of northeast China. Twenty-five Northeast crossbred ewes (fine-wool sheep × Small-tailed Han sheep) were randomly selected and divided into five groups (G1, G2, G3, G4 and G5). During a 30 day feeding trial, each group of ewes were offered the same basal diet (composed of 0.36 kg chopped maize stalk (10 mm), 0.14 kg corn meal, 0.05 kg soybean meal and 1.2 g NaCl) and one of the five supplementary roughage mixes, namely 100% Leymus chinensis hay (G1), 100% Vigna radiata stalk (G2), L. chinensis hay plus Suaeda glauca (G3), V. radiata stalk plus S. glauca (G4) and L. chinensis hay plus V. radiata stalk and S. glauca (G5). The results showed that roughage mixes had significant influences on daily roughage intake and daily weight gain of ewes. Ewes had greater daily roughage intake when supplemented with three species of roughage compared to the roughage with one species; however, there was no significant difference between G1 and G2, G3 and G4, or between G4 and G5. The average daily gain of ewes was also greater when they were supplemented with the roughage combination of L. chinensis, V. radiata stalk and S. glauca. No difference in average daily weight gain was observed between the G4 and G5 treatments (P > 0.05). The lowest average daily weight gain was observed when the ewes were supplemented with V. radiata stalk alone (G2) (P < 0.05). The results indicated that supplying ewes with various roughages simultaneously in winter could improve their forage intake and average daily weight gain compared to offering the ewes only one type of dietary roughage. Further, feeding roughage supplements containing a diverse mix of roughage species represents one method for increasing roughage utilization in livestock production during winter in the pastoral-farming areas of northeastern China.

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High plant diversity stimulates foraging motivation in grazing herbivores

Cited by 16 publications

References 33 publications

Designing Diverse Agricultural Pastures for Improving Ruminant Production Systems

Designing Diverse Agricultural Pastures for Improving Ruminant Production Systems

Sheep in Species-Rich Temperate Grassland: Combining Behavioral Observations with Vegetation Characterization

Forage intake and weight gain of ewes is affected by roughage mixes during winter in northeastern China

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