Forage tests, hay sales have come a long way
Dairy producers, nutritionists, producers, and marketers of hay and other forage material often use indexes used to rank forage quality. These indexes include relative feed value (RFV), relative forage quality (RFQ), California total digestible nutrients (CA TDN), total digestible nutrients (TDN), milk per ton, and others. The best-known indexes are often associated with the buying and selling of hay, especially in the dairy sector.
A step forward
In 1972 the American Forage and Grassland Council (AFGC) established a Hay Marketing Task Force to identify hay marketing problems, potential solutions, and make recommendations for change. The Task Force co-sponsored a Hay Quality and Analysis Roundtable at Beltsville, Md., in 1975 that brought various stakeholders together to make recommendations. From this discussion it was advocated that hay grading standards from 1949 based on color, smell, and presence or absence of foreign material should be replaced with the use of neutral detergent fiber (NDF) and acid detergent fiber (ADF) to estimate dry matter intake and dry matter digestibility.