Strategies to Enhance Biomass Production in Forage Crops Under Challenging Environments

Forages are an important source of nutrition and health benefits for dairy animals. Forage growth, nutritional quality, biomass, and yield are important agronomic traits that are severely impacted by a number of abiotic stresses, including drought, salinity, and chilling injury. The impact of these diverse stresses on fodder crops has received comparatively little attention. To address these issues, we presented a thorough analysis of the negative effects of abiotic stresses in this chapter, as well as farmer-friendly agronomic management techniques such as nitrogen fertilizer application, irrigation management, and optimizing soil conditioning through tillage to conserve moisture and increase soil water retention capacity. These approaches would particularly help to ensure water supply, biomass production, and drought stress alleviation. To aid in the recovery of saline, sodic, and saline-sodic soils, calcium (Ca2+) and magnesium (Mg2+) enhanced fertilizers should be used instead of Na+, and salt leaching should be permitted through frequent irrigations. Heat-tolerant/adaptive cultivars can minimize crop-growing areas while protecting plants, soils, and the environment from the harmful impacts of abiotic stresses. Abiotic stress damage to forage crops can be significantly reduced by cultivating N2-fixing legume forages, introducing environmentally friendly plant-nutrient benefit-providing symbionts, and using organic amendments such as plant growth-promoting microbes (PGPM), biochar, mineral nutrition, and organic acids (OA). Furthermore, these methods create new prospects for smart and sustainable agriculture.