Red Clover Superior to Alfalfa

WASHINGTON - Jul 5/01 - STAT -- Cattle producers ought to consider switching from alfalfa to red clover silage because this could reduce nitrogen levels in manure, something with would benefit the environment.

Glen Broderick, an Agricultural Research Service dairy scientist in Madison, Wis., says this is because red clover has an enzyme called polyphenol oxidase that reduces protein breakdown in the silo.

Typically, more than half the protein in alfalfa silage gets broken down to nonprotein nitrogen (NPN) that is used inefficiently by the cow. On average, red clover silage has only 60% of the NPN of alfalfa. If not used to make milk, un-used NPN is excreted by the animal.

Five feeding trials were conducted with cows at the ARS research farm at Madison. In the latest two studies, cows produced the same amount of milk on less feed: an average of 68 pounds of milk a day on 54 pounds of alfalfa dry matter, compared with cows producing 69 pounds of milk a day on 49 pounds of red clover dry matter. This means a 10% increase in feed efficiency and a 10% greater energy value for cows fed red clover silage, according to Broderick.

Protein efficiency was 17% better on red clover than alfalfa in these last two trials. Even if this improvement applied only to the first half of lactation, when cows are fed the most protein, nitrogen excretion would be reduced by about 1.5 tons per year on a 100-cow dairy farm.

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