Ralph Ward of Cumberland Valley Analytical Services was a featured speaker at the 2011 Western Alfalfa and Forage Symposium.
Ralph Ward, President of CVAS, was a featured speaker at the 2012 Western Alfalfa and Forage Symposium held December 11 -13 in Las Vegas, NV. Mr. Ward’s talk was “Analyzing Silage Crops for Quality: What is most important?” This presentation focused on the more important qualitative aspects of forage evaluation and how to prioritize evaluation criteria.
Mr. Ward’s talk complemented presentations by Dr. Dave Mertens, Dr. Normand St-Pierre, and Dr. Dan Putnam who all discussed moving away from an ADF, NDF, or RFV approach to haycrop quality evaluation. Speakers advocated approaches that were mechanistic, utilizing digestible components to define quality.
Mr. Ward introduced the concept of a “Digestible Organic Matter Index”. In this approach, CVAS has established a new index system for ranking alfalfa hay and silage for marketing purposes. Simple but powerful, this system utilizes invitro indigestible fiber at 30 hours and ash to determine the amount of digestible organic matter available to the high producing dairy cow.
Distribution graphs of alfalfa evaluated under this system are shown below. More information on this new index system will be provided in the next several months.
A copy of Mr. Ward’s paper may be obtained by accessing “Analyzing Silage Crops for Quality: What is most important?”
The PPT presentation may be Downloaded as well. The proceedings of the conference are available at UCDavis.