Evaluation of the productivity and quality of cock’s foot selection numbers

Cock’s foot as an early-ripening, highly nutritious cereal is a valuable fodder crop being demanded in fodder production. Under favorable environmental conditions of moisture and nutrition, this crop becomes a complete feed with an average energy nutrition of more than 10 MJ of exchangeable energy in 1 kg of dry matter and a crude protein content of 17-19 %. The aim of our study was to investigate and isolate promising selection numbers with high yields of dry matter, good quality of fodder with the highly adaptive resistance to various abiotic and biotic stress factors. The study material was four promising selection numbers in the breeding nursery as SN 10/18 (control), SN 5/18, SN 8/18, and SN 16/18. In three investigation years, we gave prominence by fodder productivity to selection samples SN 8/18 and SN 5/18, dry matter of which yielded 25.4 and 20.4 t/ha exceeding the control sample (19.2 t/ha) by 6.2 and 1.2 t/ha or 32.3 % and 6.3 %, respectively. The crude protein content in dry matter of the studied numbers ranged from 12.7 to 13.5 %. According to this indicator, the selection samples surpassed the control (12.3 %). The highest indicator value was found for SN 16/18. SN 8/18 was best in terms of crude protein yields summarized for three years (3.3 t/ha). The selection samples that showed high results in the experiment will be involved into the breeding process as sources of economically valuable traits.