Huang Jianhui

Scientific basis and practical ways forsustainable development of China’s pasture regions

Great changes have taken place in the dietary structure of urban and rural residents in China since the country’s reform and opening starting from the end of 1970s. During the past three decades, grain consumption has reduced and animal food consumption has increased significantly, causing a sharply increased demand of forage. However, the country’s cropping structure has not been adjusted timely, resulting in a large number of grain to be used as forage. Although China has a grassland area of 4×10 8 hectares, which should play an important role in the country’s ecological security and food security, its forage grass and livestock production are considerably low, with different levels of degradation across the grasslands, so that it is far not satisfied with a need of animal husbandry development, because of its extensive management and less input of prataculture. Our analysis showed that developing artificial pasture, which grass yield can be more than 10 times higher than natural grassland, is an effective way to promote the production of forage grass in China. We thus developed the “animal-husbandry development” model, which uses a small area (less than 10% of the grassland) with high quality site to develop intensive artificial pasture to enhance forage grass production, and prevents a large area of the natural grassland (more than 90% of the grassland) from degradation and over-grazing. In order to implement “animal husbandry development” model, we proposed to construct an “eco-animal husbandry experimental zone” in the grassland areas. The “experimental zone” is planned and designed as a coupled system of nature-economy-society complex in a considerably large area, to promote production of artificial pasture and animal husbandry and improve ecological functioning of natural grassland. This paper also discusses the bottleneck issues about socio-economic development in pasturing areas, and proposed seven principles for the development of pasturing areas, including grass breeding, artificial grassland planting, efficient harvesting, efficient use of water, protection and better use of natural grassland, trade-off between grass production and ecological functioning, and system development.

Principles of modern forage products processingand the technology development

The rapid and healthy development of animal husbandry is an important guarantee to meet human needs for animal products in both quantity and quality, and is thus an important issue in the development of modern prataculture. By improving the forage quality and its utilization efficiency, the processing of forage products plays a pivotal role in linking crop farming and livestock industry in the modern animal husbandry, and thus adjusts forage supply with both seasonal and yearly variation. Therefore, the processing of forage products, as an important support for the development of livestock husbandry, is endowed with a new historical mission. The theoretical foundation for the processing of forage products is how to keep and improve forage nutrition effectively while to decrease the nutrition loss during storage. The forage processing has adopted approaches in modern biology, agricultural science, industrial science, and animal nutrition science as well to develop the forage processing technologies and in the end to yield high quality forage. In this article, we summarized the current research achievements and existing issues in the processing of forage products at home and abroad regarding concepts, significances, current situations, main theories and technologies. By analyzing problems we have met, we finally proposed some suggestions in the development of the modern processing of forage products in China, which we consider an important guidance significant for forage production with high quality in the future.