Enhance

The Enhance project is assessing the nutritive value of saltbush and the potential to manage the behavior of an animal's voluntary intake of the plant to better define saltbush grazing benefits. 

Planting saltbush on mildly saline land leads to greater whole farm profitability, increased livestock carrying capacity in autumn and a range of environmental benefits. The unique attributes for saltbush, which make it the standout option for managing non-waterlogged saline land, include its capacity to provide limiting nutrients for animals, but this has been inadequately explored whilst attention has been on defining its contribution of digestible energy and salt to livestock.

Saltbush has the potential to be used as a high value, standing supplement of antioxidants, betaine, sulphur and selenium, which reverses the way in which the plant has been assessed in the past. We will also investigate the potential to manage animal behaviour to reduce variation in voluntary saltbush intake.

Objectives

The Enhance project aims to:

• Co-ordinate all nutritive value and secondary compound analyses for the shrub work on both saline and non saline lands
• Continue to build the NIR calibrations to allow rapid and inexpensive prediction of nutritive value and begin to develop predictions for key secondary compounds (for both OMSB and Enrich)
• Continue the development of shrub in vivo standards for calibration of laboratory prediction methodologies
• Evaluate factors influencing animal preference amongst the OMSB collection (on both saline and non-saline land) in conjunction with the OMSB selection project
• In conjunction with Enrich, explore the potential of foetal programming and peer training in diet selection and animal performance.

For more information about the Enhance project, contact Hayley Norman.