Potential of Legume–Brassica Intercrops for Forage Production and Green Manure: Encouragements from a Temperate Southeast European Environment

Abstract

Legumes and brassicas have much in common: importance in agricultural history, rich biodiversity, numerous forms of use, high adaptability to diverse farming designs, and various non-food applications. Rare available resources demonstrate intercropping legumes and brassicas as beneficial to both, especially for the latter, profiting from better nitrogen nutrition. Our team aimed at designing a scheme of the intercrops of autumn- and spring-sown annual legumes with brassicas for ruminant feeding and green manure, and has carried out a set of field trials in a temperate Southeast European environment and during the past decade, aimed at assessing their potential for yields of forage dry matter and aboveground biomass nitrogen and their economic reliability via land equivalent ratio. This review provides a cross-view of the most important deliverables of our applied research, including eight annual legume crops and six brassica species, demonstrating that nearly all the intercrops were economically reliable, as well as that those involving hairy vetch, Hungarian vetch, Narbonne vetch and pea on one side, and fodder kale and rapeseed on the other, were most productive in both manners. Feeling encouraged that this pioneering study may stimulate similar analyses in other environments and that intercropping annual legume and brassicas may play a large-scale role in diverse cropping systems, our team is heading a detailed examination of various extended research.

Seasonal changes of soil carbon fractions and enzyme activities in response to winter cover crops under long‐term rotation and tillage systems

“…This could be explained by two interrelated factors: first, under our experimental conditions, winter rye (cover crop treatment) was relatively more frequent under a 2‐year rotation and very well known for a relatively large amount of biomass production (Delgado, 1998), as compared to the blend of legumes and brassica as a cover crop mixture planted after the harvest of small grains in higher diversified rotations (3‐year and 4‐year rotations). Second, the growth of the blend in higher‐order rotations was limited by planting time after winter wheat and oat, therefore the blended cover crop survives under inadequate solar radiation (Dabney, Delgado, & Reeves, 2001) in autumn and the more frost‐sensitive nature of legumes (Jeromela et al, 2017) as compared to winter rye. Thus, the loss of rotation complexity under maize‐soybean (2 years) was partially met by growing winter rye, which may result in substantially higher or equal biomass inputs under 2‐year rotation in comparison to 3‐year and 4‐year rotations in a single rotation cycle.…”

Mathematical models describing disappearance of Lucerne hay in the rumen using the nylon bag technique

“…Lucerne (Medicago sativa L.) is important because of its high protein content and digestibility in comparison with many other forages (Ferdinand & Jung, 2005). Identification of the quality and nutritional value of these forage plants would be effective in describing animal nutrition (Jeromela et al, 2017;Bi et al, 2018;Besharati et al, 2020). Changes in digestive processes are of nutritional importance, because they determine the quantity of nutrients that are available to the animal (Sauvant & Noziere, 2016;Van Soest, 2018).…”

Effect of Brassicaceae as cover crops

“…Potrebna količina semena za raž je 120 kg ha -1 , a za stočnu rotkvu 15 kg ha -1 (Ugrenović, 2018). U združenom usevu kupusnjače daju potporu leptirnjačama, a leptirnjače obezbeđuju azot i kompeticiju prema korovima u početnim fazama rasta (Marjanović Jeromela et al, 2017).…”