Implications of grass-clover interactions in dairy pastures for forage indexing systems. 4. Canterbury

ABSTRACTThis paper describes how the core treatments in the national experimental design (all combinations of with/without clover and high/low nitrogen (N)) were implemented at an irrigated Canterbury site and monitored for three years. There was a consistent N × clover interaction, caused mainly by substantially lower yields in the Low N without clover treatment compared with all other treatments. At the phenotypic contrast level, the main effect of perennial ryegrass heading date on white clover content was significant in four of the nine seasonal data sets available: on these occasions, mixtures based on mid-season heading cultivars had higher clover content than later season-heading cultivars. However, this difference was not sufficient to cause any clover × cultivar interactions in herbage accumulation. Hence, the hypothesis that relative yield rankings of ryegrass cultivars do not differ when ryegrass is grown in monoculture or in mixture with white clover is supported.