Creation of Fodder Agrophytocenoses for the Restoration of Degraded Native Pastures and Improvement of their Performance

Abstract

This article presents the results of two years of development of technological methods to create fodder agrophytocenoses in natural environments under arid climatic conditions in order to restore the ecology and improve the productivity of degraded pasturable ecosystems. The dynamics of the phytopotential performance of agrophytocenoses have been studied in different variants according to plant species, sowing times, and sowing methods. The experiments have been conducted with methods developed by the All-Russia Research Institute of Fodder (2015) and Dospekhov (1985). Therefore, the experiments conducted with the different pasturable plants investigated that the winterfat (Eutoria ceratoides) was reputed to be the most productive of all of the sown species. Its annual average crop yield was three times higher than that for the native pasture in the first year and 3.6 times in the second year. The experiments conducted with wheatgrass (Agropyron) sown at different times have proved that the pasture was generally (71–76%) occupied by wheatgrass (Agropyron) sown in autumn in the first year of vegetation, while the spring-sown wheatgrass crop had a projective cover of only 49–54% up to the second year of vegetation. The experiments conducted with wheatgrass sown by different methods proved that the spring- and autumn-sown projective cover crops of agrophytocenoses with the use of the broadcasting method represented increases of 7% and 17%, respectively, as compared to the drilling method.