ABSTRACT
The potential for animal production from crop residues is impressive. The US produces about 56 million metric tons of wheat annually and another 200 million metric tons of feed (coarse) grains. The use of crop residues as livestock feed may increase in the future for several reasons. If the world population continues to increase, our capacity to produce food will be stressed. Producing animal products from crop residues presents several problems, the most serious of which is the low quality of the residues. The greatest opportunity for increasing straw quality would be to harvest immediately after grain harvest. Grain harvest cannot be practically changed. One is manipulation of harvest time of corn and maybe sorghum stalks to obtain higher quality residues, and another is the treatment of residues with chemicals to increase digestibility. Many chemicals have been screened in laboratory experiments for potential to enhance digestibility.
