Sorghum is a multipurpose crop where all parts of the plant are used for human food, animal food, fuel and fabrication. In comparison to other cereal crops it requires little water and it is tolerant to poor soils and adverse climatic conditions. It is one of the most widely grown crops in India particularly in semi-arid and rain-fed regions where the potential for crop and livestock production is limited by the availability of water. During the kharif season (July to October), it occupies about 10 million ha of land and produces a large quantity of stover which is given to farm livestock. The rabi season crop (November to February) occupies about 6 million ha of land and is mainly dependent upon residual moisture in the soil and provides both grain and forage. The economic value of sorghum stover as fodder sometimes exceeds that of the grain because seasonal shortage of food is an acute problem during the dry season. Much effort has been expended on improving sorghum varieties (Burton, 1973; Gupta et al., 1976; Dongi and Paroda, 1978), mostly directed towards increasing the yield. Pederson et al. (1982) compared the quality and agronomic traits of 49 forage sorghum hybrids and suggested that the most rapid way to improve the quality of forage sorghum would be to improve its in vitro dry-matter (DM) digestibility. There are several new strains of sorghum which have been improved in terms of agronomic characters but there is little information on the nutritional quality of their stovers. Therefore the objective of this study was to evaluate the stovers of several new sorghum strains in terms of chemical composition, in sacco DM disappearance (DMD) and their silage quality.
Agronomic and silage quality traits of forage sorghum cultivars in 1995