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In order to combine the ability of legumes to fix atmospheric nitrogen and the cruciferous capacities to mobilize soil nutrients and herbicide action, the aim of this work was to evaluate an alternative winter intercrop (faba bean-rapeseed) as a replacement of Italian ryegrass culture in a rotational system with maize as summer crop. For this purpose, two adjacent plots were used during three agronomic years (2011-2012, 2012-2013 and 2013-2014) to evaluate the agronomic performance through the forage production, nutritional composition of forage and silage, and the effects on soil fertility. The Italian ryegrass was cultivated under conventional management: using chemical fertilization and recommended dosages of herbicides. The faba bean-rapeseed intercrop was cultivated under an alternative management: organic fertilization and less herbicide supply. The intercrop provides higher forage yield per hectare than Italian ryegrass, with greater protein (kg ha−1) and similar energy (GJ ha−1) yields. The intercrop allows reducing the inputs of chemical fertilization and herbicides, and it has a positive effect on the balance of soil nutrients, especially increasing the potassium, calcium and magnesium contents. The results show that faba bean-rapeseed intercrop could be an alternative to the Italian ryegrass as winter crop. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Corn silage is an important feed for intensive ruminant production. Combining corn with legumes for silage is a feasible strategy to improve crude protein (CP) concentration in corn silage. This study was conducted to determine silage nutritive quality and fermentation profiles of corn grown in mixture with soybean at different crop combination ratio. In this experiment, corn-soybean combinations of 75:25, 50:50 and 25:75 in addition to monocrops of corn and soybean were evaluated. The crop combination ratio had significant effects on nutritive quality and fermentation characteristics of silage. Silage quality in terms of CP (75:25 ratio 12.23%, 50:50 ratio 12.88% and 25:75 ratio 13.65%) was improved by intercropping compared with corn sole crop (9.91% CP). Increase ratio of soybean resulted in an increase in lactic acid and pH of the mixed silage. Sole soybean gave significantly higher lactic acid (3.57%) and pH of silage (4.33) compared to all other treatments but dry matter concentration was significantly higher in corn monocrop silage (34.34%) than other treatments. The propionic acid and butyric acid content of soybean monocrop and intercrops silage were in all cases higher than sole corn silage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The consumption of seeds of the Fabaceae family is distributed worldwide mainly due to their high content of proteins, carbohydrates, dietary fiber and polyunsaturated fatty acids, jointly with vitamins and minerals. However, they contain several non-nutritive compounds (NNCs) that can exert adverse or beneficial actions upon ingestion depending on their chemical structure, concentration, time of exposure and their interaction with other dietary components. In this review, we present the representative legume NNCs, their chemical nature and their adverse and beneficial biological actions. Moreover, we summarized updated findings on the effect of different traditional processing, bearing in mind that legumes are mainly consumed in the household milieu, on the concentration of legume NNCs. The results of the in-vivo studies prove that the reduction/elimination of legume NNCs improves nutritional quality and the fate of improvements depends on many parameters such as botanical source, chemical composition, content, type of processing and operational conditions used, among others. Together, this review can provide a comprehensive perspective for further elucidating the roles of plant lectins that may target programmed cell death pathways. This review may, in turn, ultimately help to consumers for whom legumes are part of a vegetarian diet or are consumed as staple food which must take into consideration the improvement of legume nutritive quality by traditional processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The potential of different legume seeds species, including recently new developed varieties (Vicia faba: a commercial variety and varieties Alameda, Palacio and Baraka; Lupinus angustifolius; Pisum sativum and Cicer arietinum: varieties Fardon and Zegri) as protein supplements to low quality forages was evaluated. First, the chemical composition, in vitro digestibility, in situ degradability and in vitro/in situ intestinal digestibility of legume seeds were determined. The chemical composition was rather similar within genus. Vicia faba beans contained more condensed tannins (35.8-56.4 g/kg DM) and less ether extract (12.8-9.5 g/kg DM) than the other legumes. The rumen degradability and intestinal digestibility of the undegraded protein in the rumen was very similar among the seeds, with exception of lupins, having a much higher degradation rate than the rest. Second, the fermentation characteristics of diets, which were based on two low quality forages (olive leaves and barley straw) and feed blocks without or with supplementation of legume seeds or soybean meal, were investigated by using single-flow continuous culture fermenters. In this trial, the fermentation parameters (ammonia, pH and volatile fatty acids), the microbial protein synthesis and the degradation of olive leaves and barley straw promoted by the different diets were studied. Compared to soybean meal, beans and peas showed similar suitability as protein supplements for sustaining in vitro fermentation of low-quality forages. However, our results suggest a significant interaction between the type of legume used as supplement and the type of forage used, which need to be further studied in vivo. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]