Incorporating Plantain with Perennial Ryegrass-White Clover in a Dairy Grazing System: Dry Matter Yield, Botanical Composition, and Nutritive Value Response to Sowing Rate, Plantain Content and Season

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This is a well-written paper that reports on important aspects of pasture botanical composition. It seems to be longer and more repetitive than necessary and parts of the Results and Discussion sections can be shortened. A brief introduction to the particular bioactive compounds that were evaluated, including their importance in livestock nutrition and health, would be helpful. Questions and suggestions follow according to line no. Please also see attached marked copy with additional questions and suggestions.

12 Abstract should begin with an issue, problem, or hypothesis statement.

24 and throughout Do you mean amylase-treated NDF (aNDF) as defined in Mertens et al. 2002. J of AOAC International 85(6);1217-1240?

41-43 Given that ryegrass and white clover are mainstays of temperate dairy pastures, how/why is incorporation of plantain into these pastures necessarily appealing? What is the connection? Perhaps another way to phrase this is 'While perenn. ryegrass and white clover are the mainstays ... , incorporation of plantain ... appeals to ... because of ______ (certain attributes or advantages it can confer).'

Somewhere before 72 A brief introduction to the particular bioactive compounds of interest and their importance in livestock nutrition and health, would be helpful.

99-101 Why were these several interventions necessary? Was there inadequate establishment or premature failure of plantain density?

184 Why did you switch from MIXED to GLM?

187-188 It is unclear what this means. I think that this means that the GLM model was used for all nutritional value, mineral, and bioactive compound parameters for which there was a response to plantain treatment level. Please clarify.

222 and throughout Please clarify if 'content' means proportion (or concentration).

270-271 and elsewhere You are repeating results that you have already described in text or shown in table(s) or fig(s). Please try to eliminate repetitiveness in the Results and Discussion sections.

377-393 Please discuss the significance and application of the results for bioactive compounds. What is their value or impact?

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

General comments

This paper provides relevant and timely data on the establishment and value of plantain  in standard ryegrass/clover dairy pastures. An area of concern that needs to be addressed, however, is the termination of the H treatment before the L and M treatments.  It would be good to know how the missing data is treated when providing the mean effects annually and for the seasons (Tables 3 and 5).  Having only 1 set of data for treatment H for the Autumn period may compromise the comparisons between treatments. It may be better to terminate all treatments at the end of March 2021 (as was the case for the modelling over 705 days) so that relevant comparisons can be made.

Specific comments

Abstract

There is nothing in the abstract that mentions the extra plantain incorporated at the end of the first year.  I think it is important to include this as the reader of the abstract gets the impression that plantain was only incorporated at sowing and not again after 1 year  -  and would interpret the persistence in this context

Introduction

Line 53 - remove 's' from lowers

Lines 71-77 - Study objective - Would it not have been better to not incorporate more plantain after the first year if your objective was to determine the change 'from sowing' of plantain content 'over two years'?  Might need to reconsider how this objective is worded and how the 'change in plantian % over time is discussed in the paper.

Line 76  - plantain spelt wrong

Materials and Methods

Line 81 - I assume the dates define what is meant by the experimental period.  There could be confusion in interpretation based on the fact that the H treatment was removed prior to June 2021 and some of the analysis only included data up to March 2021. - see comments in the general section above

Line 93 - randomised is used twice - remove the first mention

Line 94 - Suggest you define what is in the four adaption areas (eg add in something like -  'for each of the pasture treatments')

Line 99 - perhaps best to use 'during' instead of 'throughout'

Line 99-103 - I wouldn't call the cessation of treatment 'H' as an intervention as it was terminated and not included in the experiment from this point.  It would be best to just refer to one intervention and then just state that treatment H was terminated early.  Hence change 'Several interventions' to 'One intervention'

Line 130 and 131 - add an 's' to grazing

Results

Line 246 - suggest you change 'effect pattern' to something else.. eg - the observed and modelled response of the main measured experimental parameters is presented in....

Line 247 - Change 'Overally' - to overall

Line 257 - not all parameters in these graphs are %.  Suggest you add g/kg DM before sodium in line 258

Line 263 - percentage spelt wrong

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

The authors propose a manuscript titled “Incorporating plantain with perennial ryegrass - white clover in a dairy grazing system: dry matter yield, botanical composition, and nutritive value response to sowing rate, plantain content and season”.

I suggest the following changes:

Abstract: The abstract begins with the aim of the study. A general description of the background could precede the aim.

Materials and Methods: It would be important to add information about the varieties included in the study.

Results: The authors should provide ANOVA tables containing mean squares and degrees of freedom

Conclusions: Please provide a more detailed presentation of conclusions

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 3 Report

Please provide some descriptive information for each genotype that would be helpful for readers.

Please provide ANOVA tables with the mean squares and the significance with ** or * for 99% and 95% significance, respectively.

Conclusions section needs to be revised for better reflection of the results 

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf