Abstract
The natural grasslands in northern China have been seriously degraded due mainly to overgrazing and climate change in recent decades, leading to shortage of forage supply to animal husbandry. To maximize forage production, we developed a two-harvest regime of oat forage by sowing in spring in an alpine region of Hulun Buir, northern China, using two oat early maturation species. The agronomic characteristics and forage quality of the two-harvest regime were evaluated across three constructive years from 2017 to 2019. Compared to the traditional one-harvest regime, the production, resource use efficiency, and economic benefits were compared and quantified for both oat species across the 3 years. Dry weight forage by the two-harvest regime was increased by 17.5–18.5%, while crude protein was increased by 25.1–30.0%. Growing days by the two-harvest regime was increased by 36.7% on average, nitrogen fertilizer use efficiency was enhanced by 25.1–30.0%, while water use efficiency was not significantly changed. The two-harvest regime also increased the net profit by 28.0%. Taken together, our results reveal that the two-harvest regime of forage production in the cold region of northern China is a promising practice with high forage yield, nutritional value, and nitrogen fertilizer use efficiency as well as economic profit.
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Data availability
The datasets used and/or analyzed during the study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
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Acknowledgements
We thank technicians and workers in Xieertala farm and experimental station for their help in oat sowing, management, and harvest in field experiment.
Funding
This work was funded by the Science and Technology Department of Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region (grant number 2020CG0064).
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L.H., W.B., and W.-H.Z. conceived and designed the experiments; L.H., R.B., Y.L., W.Y., G.T., Q.Z., J.Z., and S.S. performed the experiments; L.H., W.B., and W.-H.Z. analyzed the data; L.Y., W.B., and W.-H.Z. wrote the manuscript.
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Hou, L., Bai, W., Zhang, Q. et al. Agronomic and economical characterizations of a two-harvest regime for oat forage in cold regions of Northern China. Environ Sci Pollut Res 28, 68804–68816 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-021-15369-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-021-15369-1