FORAGE YIELD AND QUALITY OF Gliricidia sepium, Tithonia diversifolia AND Cynodon nlemfuensis IN MONOCULTURE AND AGROFORESTRY SYSTEMS

Abstract

Intensive livestock systems allow reaching higher productivity, competitiveness and sustainability. The use of agroforestry systems (AFS) would ease the attainment of those systems, although there is no scientific information regarding the behavior of Cynodon nlemfuensis, Tithonia diversifolia and Gliricidia sepium under AFS conditions. Therefore, the objective of this study was to evaluate the forage yield and quality of C. nlemfuensis, T. diversifolia and G. sepium in monoculture and in AFS. The experimental design was completely random and the treatments were: C. nlemfuensis (MCn), T. diversifolia (MTd) and G. sepium (MGs) in monoculture with six repetitions and AFS made up of the same species with five repetitions. The variables were forage yield, leaf:stalk rate, crude protein (CP) and neutral detergent fiber (NDF) content. AFS had the highest global forage yield (11.8 Mg DM ha-1 ) compared to MCn, MTd and MGs (8.4, 2.7 and 2.1 Mg DM ha-1 , respectively). When comparing between systems, the MCn was higher than SACn, SATd was higher than MTd, whereas MGs was similar to SAGs. The forage composition (proportion of leaf and stalk) and the CP and NDF content did not vary between cultivation systems. The use of AFS increases the total forage production, without affecting the forage composition and nutritional quality of the grass.