Techniques for measuring forage intake of grazing animals

The knowledge of forage intake by grazing ruminants is very important for ecological, economical and management reasons. Eventhough, intake measurements in grazing studies has been the subject of extensive research for many years the procedures used still remain laborious, expensive, time consuming with low precession and accuracy. In this paper several methods such as total fecal collection, markers (Cr2O3 and nalkanes) and fecal nitrogen index which are commonly used for intake determination are discussed.