South Korea: Yeoju City increases competitiveness of livestock farms through self-sufficiency of high-quality forage

[Reporter Lee Jang-hee, Korea Farmers and Fishermen Newspaper] Yeoju City, Gyeonggi Province, in cooperation with the Rural Development Administration and the Gyeonggi Provincial Agricultural Research and Extension Services, is embarking on a pilot project to distribute cultivation technology for a new domestic breed of Italian ryegrass (IRG). ‘Green Call’, a new domestically bred variety currently being cultivated on a pilot basis in Yeoju City, is characterized by a faster harvest time and higher yield as the planting period is about 10 days earlier than the existing ‘Cowin Wary’ variety. Bae Young-joo, director of the Yeoju City Agricultural Technology Center, said, “The new IRG variety is expected to solve the difficulties of farmers who had difficulty supplying forage as the harvest period of the existing ‘Cowin Wary’ variety overlapped with the rice cultivation season in Yeoju City.” “We will establish a stable production base for forage and resolve management difficulties ...