Performance of elephant grass BioGrass as in vitro breeding result in the highland of Bogor Regency, West Java, Indonesia

Abstract

Low productivity of ruminants is mainly caused by the limited availability of high-quality forages as a result of reducing the area for pasture due to land conversion, lack of particular forage plantation, absence of forage breeder to control the quality, high rate of calf mortality, and low quality of forage varieties in the current period. Therefore, it is a necessity to generate a new superior variety of forages that are easily planted, adaptable to dry land, have high productivity, and high yielded. BioGrass as forage is a prospective strain of high yielding elephant grass varieties as a result of in vitro breeding that has high productivity and quality. This research aimed to determine the productivity and quality of BioGrass in the highland of Bogor Regency, West Java compared to local elephant grass and odot grass. The results showed that the speed of growth of bio grass cuttings buds was not significantly different from the speed at which local elephant grass buds and odot appeared. The bud colour of the leaf petals appeared reddish in bio grass while the local elephant grass and odot were green. The number of tillers and local elephant grass was 3-5 tillers while the number of odot tillers was 5-7 tillers. The fresh weight of bio grass and odot was 40 kg resulted from without fertilizing urea treatment and 60 kg with fertilizing urea treatment. Meanwhile, the fresh weight of local elephant grass was 60 and 90 kg, respectively based on urea treatments. Proximate analysis showed that the highest crude protein content (CP) of the BioGrass was 17.95% with the NDF and ADF value of 61.79 and 37.27%. Whereas CP of local elephant grass was 15.38% with NDF/ADF value of 63.15 and 39.01%, and CP of odot grass was 16.30 with NDF/ADF value of 33.64%.