Lamb growth on pastures containing chicory (Cichorium intybus) under spring and summer conditions

Summary

Mountain grazing conditions represent a constraint on lamb growth performance for various reasons. One approach to counteract these effects is to graze lambs on improved pastures. We tested the effects of grazing ewes and/or their lambs on established grass-clover (GCM), chicory alone (CHA), and grass­ clover-chicory (GCC) stands on spring (Exp. l) and surruner (Exp.2) pastures on lamb performance. We hypothesized that CHA and GCC would sustain higher spring and autumn daily gain oflambs compared with GCM. In Exp.1, 12 twin-rearing ewes together with their 24 lambs were randomly allocated into three sward types replicated twice (n= 2 ewes, 4 lambs/ replicate) and monitored for 25 d before sending to mountain pasture. In Exp.2, 24 weaned lambs from the mountain pasture were again randomly allocated to one of the above pasture types and grazed for 28 d. We observed differences in chemical composition and estimated energy values between swards containing chicory and GCM swards. However, these did not affect lamb performance during both experiments, contrary to our previous findings, suggesting that
grazing sheep either selected against chicory, or the observed differences in chemical composition among sward types were not strang enough to influence performance, or a combination of the two possible effects.