Improve productivity, quality of forage crops and research direction
Green fodder crops play an important role in breeding for ruminant animals. Animal feed that can be fed directly through cutting or grazing or dry processing makes up most of the daily diet, supplementary feed is used to compensate for nutritional deficiencies in providing forage, increasing animal performance during certain periods. Therefore, the yield and quality of green food crops have a great impact on economic efficiency in livestock production.
Despite being an important crop, research on forage is limited when compared to cereal crops, fruit trees and vegetables. This article summarizes the literature highlighting the importance of forage crops, current improvements and some future directions for improving the performance and nutritional quality of forage crops. The research results obtained from the cereal crop can be applied to the forage crop. The timely development of genomic technology and bioinformatics along with genomic editing techniques provide great scope for improving crops for forage. Given the social, environmental and economic importance of forage crops globally and especially in poor countries, this opportunity has immense potential for improved food security and stability economic development.
