Cover crop, soil improver
Rape forage is a valuable cover crop during end of summer, autumn and winter. It prevents soil erosion and N leaching. It can be used as green manure in order to improve soil structure (GNIS, 2019).
Water saving
In semi-arid areas of Mexico, rape forage can be an alternative to traditional feeds for dairy cows (oats, barley, wheat and perennial ryegrass) as it requires 40% less water than these latter (Sanchez-Gutierrez et al., 2018).
Methane emissions
In a experiment in New Zealand, lambs fed fresh winter forage rape yielded 22–30% less CH4 than those fed perennial ryegrass and the difference persisted for 15 weeks. The lower CH4 yields from forage rape were associated with a different microbial community, a faster fermentation and a lower ruminal pH. Forage rape could be a viable CH4 mitigation tool for pastoral-based sheep production systems (Sun et al., 2015).