Feed Crops

annual, biennial, and perennial plants grown as food for farm animals. Feed crops include grasses, roots and tubers, cucurbits, silage crops, and grains. Feed crops are planted in field and fodder crop rotations and on plots not used for crop rotation. In the USSR feed crops are of great importance and the acreage devoted to them on kolkhozes, sovkhozes, and other farms has been gradually expanded.

In the USSR the proportion of the area under feed crops rose in 1971 to 31.4 percent of the total sown area, or 2.5 times the feed crop acreage in 1940 (12 percent). The proportion is highest in the Baltic republics and in the Ukrainian SSR. It is very high in some foreign countries, for example, in 1970, 53.2 percent of the total area under crops was devoted to feed crops in Hungary, 77.5 percent in Great Britain, 43.8 percent in the German Democratic Republic, 87.3 percent in Denmark, 57.7 percent in the United States, 65.4 percent in France, and 52.3 percent in the Federal Republic of Germany.

Forage grasses include annual and perennial grasses of the legume and grass families; important root crops are turnips, fodder carrots, semisugar and sugar fodder beets, and rutabagas; and among widely used fodder tuber crops are potatoes (fodder varieties) and Jerusalem artichoke. Cucurbits used for feed include citronmelon, vegetable marrow, and pumpkin, and important silage crops are corn, sunflower, collards, Jerusalem artichoke, white mustard, and winter rape. Grain legumes (peas, soybeans, lentils) and cereal grains (rye, oats, barley, millet) are also grown for green feed and, sometimes, for hay. Feed grains are obtained from such legumes as vetch, broadbeans, peas, maple peas, and lupine and from such grains as oats, barley, corn, sorghum, and foxtail and African millet.