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Current Status of Feed Quality Breeding and Testing in North America

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Abstract

Although selection for improved feed quality is an important objective for many North American forage breeding programs, especially for those based in dairy regions, it is generally of secondary importance to improved forage mass, persistence, and stress tolerance. The advent of more efficient and high-throughput phenotyping and genotyping procedures will decrease the cost of feed quality analysis and increase the efficiency of trait improvement. At the FRRL, our main focus is forage mass and abiotic stress tolerance in limited precipitation regions. We also seek to develop forage cultivars with increased feed quality. Current breeding populations and molecular biological tools allow us to better dissect the genetics of these traits and incorporate them into improved cultivars.

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Correspondence to J. G. Robins .

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© 2016 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

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Robins, J.G., Bushman, B.S., Jensen, K.B. (2016). Current Status of Feed Quality Breeding and Testing in North America. In: Roldán-Ruiz, I., Baert, J., Reheul, D. (eds) Breeding in a World of Scarcity. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28932-8_26

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