This versatile, multi-purpose crop helps you raise milk and meat production for the coming season – and for several seasons to come.

Festulolium varieties give you higher yield, faster establishment, better persistency, and improved digestibility.

Growing a catch crop of grass within a field of maize offers farmers several benefits, such as retaining more nitrogen for the following crop, improving soil structure, and reducing erosion. And at the same time, a catch crop has a potential source of compliance with EU greening rules. And if they choose the right grass species, they can do all this with no loss of maize yield.

Farms that rely on protein-rich feed can become much more self-sufficient by growing alfalfa. Sowing a field of alfalfa helps cut the input costs, protects against fluctuations in protein prices, raises farm yields, and improves farm finances.

Alfalfa is already an economically useful crop, but there is plenty more we can do to improve it.

Red clover is an easy species to grow and is very drought tolerant. It thrives in a wide range of soils in temperate climates, and does well all year round. Red clover tolerates low winter temperatures and, thanks to its deep taproot, is tolerant of summer droughts. These attributes make the plant a useful component of clover/grass mixtures in two- or three-year conservation leys.

What can you expect from our future red clover varieties? We asked our plant breeder, Libor Jalûvka, to explain the progress of our red clover development programme that takes place at our breeding station in the Czech Republic.

In a ryegrass world, the good question is, of course, whether a crossing of ryegrass with fescue is able to deliver the quality of forage demanded by the dairy farmer and his high-yielding cows. And at the same time express the better longevity of the fescue partner in the crossing.

We asked our own festulolium expert, Vladimir Cernoch, to talk about the differences, and to explain how his breeding programme is pushing for even better performance.

The feed value of a field of clover-grass – a mixture of forage grass and clover – is higher than for a field of pure grass. Clover-grass raises milk yields. Clover also fixes nitrogen, which means that subsequent crops need less fertiliser. In short, clover boosts income when used as fodder, and reduces the cost of crops grown in the following years.

The profitability of a dairy herd depends on the quality of its nutrition. For good health and high milk yields, dairy cows need a balanced diet of roughage and concentrates. But it is the quality of the feed – whether fresh or conserved – that determines the quantity and cost of your herd’s fodder needs. First and foremost, your cows need grass that is easily digestible – grass with a high cell-wall content (NDF) and highly digestible cell walls (DNDF) – because digestibility increases forage intake and milk output.

Grass sown as a catch crop beneath maize helps maintain your soil and your nitrogen levels – and it does so with no loss of yield.

Grasses and clovers are the earth’s most widespread species, and the most important feedstuff for livestock. But grass does much more than provide short-term forage leys; throughout the world there are millions of hectares of permanent grassland.

Farmers who expect a good forage yield in the year ahead should start preparing now. If a hard winter has damaged your plants, an early diagnosis is vital. As soon as temperatures rise above 4° to 6°C and grass plants begin to grow, it is time to get down on your hands and knees to give your sward a pre-season check.

With each passing year, the productivity of a grass sward declines. By year 4, your forage grass could be yielding less than 75% of its initial output as invasive species crowd out the high-yielding, nutricious species in your original seed mixture.

With thorough soil preparation and a good sowing technique, you can get many more of your forage seeds to germinate and grow.

Recent research from DLF shows how different grass species and seed varieties germinate and establish when soil temperatures are low. There could be a seed mixture out there to help you defeat that unexpected cold snap.

A poor maize harvest in 2015 has left many dairy farmers short. They may not make enough maize silage for feeding in early summer 2016. To help them through this difficult period, we have developed a special fast-establishing mixture that can be cut within eight weeks of sowing.

We all want more from our grasses – increased yield, improved quality, better stress tolerance, stronger disease resistance – and all at once. Now the dream of better-at-everything super-grasses could be within sight thanks to genomic selection.

For every farm, there is a ForageMax® grass seed mixture in the DLF portfolio that suits your needs. We report on new mixtures that: (1) increase year-two dry-matter yields by 3,3 tonnes per hectare; (2) boost milk production; and (3) improve farm self-sufficiency.

Give your seeds a nutritional head start with a coating of ProNitro®, the mixture of slow and fast-release nitrogen. No need for fertiliser the first month because each seed comes with its own packed lunch of nitrogen.