CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

Weeping lovegrass [Eragrostis curvula (Schrad.) Nees] is a perennial and warm-season grass widely used in marginal production areas from our country due to its low input requirements that include low fertilization and irrigation costs, and to its fast growth and high biomass production in poor soils and semidesertic environments. Therefore, this grass is a suitable candidate for forage or lignocellulosic biomass production in these areas where weather conditions are extreme. In this sense, it will be useful to evaluate weeping lovegrass potential, given by nutritional quality and yield traits, not only from those commercial cultivars but also from newly developed cultivars. To compare nutritional quality and yield from different weeping lovegrass cultivars, we established a field trial located at ACA Cabildo (Asociación de Cooperativas Argentinas, Cabildo, Buenos Aires, Argentina). This experiment was done using a completely randomized block design including seven germplasm sources (five cultivars: Tanganyika, Morpa, Don Pablo, Don Juan, Don Eduardo, and two new accessions generated by biotechnological tools: 9355 and 9446) and three blocks (B1, B2, B3). Morphological traits including fresh weight, dry weight, leaf length and crown diameter, and nutritional quality traits including crude protein, in vitro dry matter digestibility, neutral detergent fiber, acid detergent fiber and lignin content were registered during two cuttings at the beginning and end of the growing season last year (November 20th , 2008 and May 6th 2009). Morphological and nutritional quality data will be analyzed and results on nutritional quality and yield will be presented.