Debbie J. Cherney - Associate Professor
PhD from University of Florida
Graduate fields: Animal Science, Nutrition
Area(s) of interest: forage utilization and quality
Teaching:
- Contemporary Perspectives of Animal Science - AS105
- Animal Nutrition - AS212
- Animal Welfare - AS310
- Ethics and Animal Science - AS414
Email: djc6@cornell.edu
Current Research:
Any forage-livestock system must integrate resources to maintain high production and ensure profitability and environmental quality. Grasses have advantages over legumes when considering nutrient management, because they do not fix atmospheric nitrogen to add to the nitrogen surplus existing on many dairy farms. Unfortunately, poor grass management on many of these farms has led to the perception that most grasses are of insufficient quality for lactating dairy cattle.
In recent years, studies have focused on identifying appropriate forage management, particularly for perennial grasses, to produce high quality dairy feed while at the same time allowing for an environmentally and economically sustainable farm system. Current projects include: 1) evaluating the interaction of various animal and crop systems with regard to dairy production and nutrient management; and 2) determining the influence of grass maturity and management practices on ruminal digestion kinetics and nutritive value. Continuing work in this area will investigate associative effects of feeding high levels of concentrates with grass forages on fiber digestibility and digestion kinetics.
Another long-term effort has been to clarify and refine standard methods used to determine forage quality. The use of modeling to predict animal performance will continue to increase. Many of these models will rely heavily on chemical characterization, because of the speed, repeatability, and generally low cost of chemical characterization. With the advent of new methodologies and a better understanding of factors limiting animal performance, the chemical characterization of forages will continue to be a worthwhile field of endeavor. Our work will concentrate on further elucidating environmental effects on forage quality, and developing prediction equations based on this information that will allow harvesting of grass forages at optimum quality.