Abstract
In the mountain areas of South Tyrol (NE Italy) there is a shortage of arable fields and silage maize is ooen cultivated as a monoculture. Although maize is a self-tolerant crop, crop rotation would be advisable to reduce the pressure of arable crops weeds, to increase soil fertility and to prevent the spreading of maize rootworm. Grass-clover leys would be well suited as rotation crops in such intensive production areas. e optimization of seed mixtures for grass-clover leys in mountain areas was studied by simultaneously investigating the effect of three regionally recommended grass-clover mixtures, three red clover (Trifolium pratense) cultivars and the replacement in the seed mixtures of Festuca pratensis by Festulolium on the forage yield. e experiment was conducted over a period of three years with four cuts per season as randomized complete block design with three replicates. Our results show that testing red clover cultivars in specific target seed mixtures seems to be a relevant approach to get accurate results about their performance and that greater differences between cultivars are mainly expected in the first harvest years.