Varied diets: implications for lamb performance, rumen characteristics, total antioxidant status, and welfare.

Intensive pastoral systems have moved away from diverse and varied diets towards overly simple monotonous diets. Feed choice through time is an obsolete way of providing forage to animals, as intensive management schemes generally allocate a single herbage or a dyad mixed sward. Monotonous feeding regimes impose nutritional repetition, which may impair animal performance and welfare.

Functional diversity vs. monotony: the effect of a multiforage diet as opposed to a single forage diet on animal intake, performance, welfare, and urinary nitrogen excretion.

The objective of this study was to determine the effect of offering animals a multiforage choice (MF) of fresh herbages on dry matter intake (DMI), live weight gain, and animal welfare, in comparison with a monotonous diet of ryegrass (Lolium perenne L.). Twenty ram lambs (30.