Danes to breed high digestible grass
Seed producer DLF has teamed-up with Aarhus University in Denmark to make the future high digestible forage grasses.
In addition to dry matter yield, the digestibility is one of the most important breeding goals of forage grasses. This is due to a very clear correlation between digestibility and milk and meat production. This is stated at the website of DLF.
Studies have shown that an increase by 1% in digestibility tops the milk production by a quarter of a litre per day. Improving the digestibility will also reduce methane. DLF states that if we can improve the digestibility by 1%, correspondingly we can be reduce methane emissions by 1-1.5%. at EU level, an improvement in digestibility of 10% will be equivalent to a methane reduction corresponding to 1 million tons of carbon dioxide per year.
The “machine” in the project (called ‘Green Select’) is Genomic Wide Selection (GWS). GWS is a technology that in future will make it possible to choose the best digestible grass from a simple DNA test. In this way we hope to develop grasses faster than it is possible today.
Source: DLF
