Assessing persistence, productivity, animal preference, forage quality and botanical composition of rotationally grazed perennial cool season grasses and clovers grown in monoculture and binary mixtures in Michigan

Most perennial cool season grasses and clovers introduced to Michigan have not been evaluated in binary mixtures. The objectives of this study, which was conducted over five growing seasons at three different latitudes in Michigan were: (i) to determine persistence and productivity of perennial grass and clover species grown in monoculture and binary mixtures under three different latitudes in Michigan; (ii) to determine botanical composition of grass-clover binary mixtures over time; (iii) to determine animal preference and forage quality of these species under rotational grazing, and (iv) to evaluate the use of Near-Infrared Reflectance Spectroscopy (NIRS) to predict the species composition using three calibration equations. Grass-clover binary mixtures resulted in greater persistence, increased ground cover, greater animal preference and higher forage quality than grass or clover growing in monoculture. However, persistence of both perennial grass and clover was related to the site of the study. Kura clover provided the highest dry matter (DM) yield (tones acre-1) and exceptional persistence under grazing particularly at southern part of Michigan. NIRS had higher prediction accuracy with R2 ranging from 0.67 to 0.72 and SEP from 6.9 to 12.8 respectively using equations generated from hand separations of several grass and clover species. NIRS can be used to replace the hand separation method to determine botanical composition pasture species using a calibration equation developed from a large data set of hand-separated samples.