ABSTRACT
Oilseed crops are widely cultivated and are related to nutrition and human health as valuable nutraceutical sources with valuable biological properties. The growing demand for oil plants used in human and animal nutrition or for the processing industry has contributed to the diversification and development of a new variety of oil crops. Increased oil crop diversity, besides ensuring reduced sensitivity to pests and climate conditions, has also led to improved nutritional values. In order to enable oil crop cultivation to become commercially sustainable, a comprehensive characterization of newly created varieties of oilseeds, including their nutritional and chemical composition, is required. In this study, two varieties of safflower and white and black mustard were investigated as alternative oil species for nutritional parameters, mainly protein, fat, carbohydrate, moisture, ash, polyphenols, flavonoids, chlorophylls contents, acids and mineral composition, and compared with those of two different genotypes of rapeseeds as a traditional oil crop plant. The proximate analysis found that the highest oil content was found in the oil rape NS Svetlana genotype (33.23%), while the lowest was in black mustard (25.37%). The protein content varies from around 26% in safflower samples to 34.63%, determined in white mustard. High content of unsaturated fatty acids and low content of saturated fatty acid was observed in the analyzed samples. In mineral analysis, the dominant elements were phosphorus, potassium, calcium and magnesium, in descending order. The observed oil crops are also good sources of microelements, including iron, copper, manganese and zinc, accompanied by high antioxidant activity due to the presence of significant amounts of polyphenolic and flavonoid compounds.
ABSTRACT
Legumes and brassicas have much in common: importance in agricultural history, rich biodiversity, numerous forms of use, high adaptability to diverse farming designs, and various non-food applications. Rare available resources demonstrate intercropping legumes and brassicas as beneficial to both, especially for the latter, profiting from better nitrogen nutrition. Our team aimed at designing a scheme of the intercrops of autumn- and spring-sown annual legumes with brassicas for ruminant feeding and green manure, and has carried out a set of field trials in a temperate Southeast European environment and during the past decade, aimed at assessing their potential for yields of forage dry matter and aboveground biomass nitrogen and their economic reliability via land equivalent ratio. This review provides a cross-view of the most important deliverables of our applied research, including eight annual legume crops and six brassica species, demonstrating that nearly all the intercrops were economically reliable, as well as that those involving hairy vetch, Hungarian vetch, Narbonne vetch and pea on one side, and fodder kale and rapeseed on the other, were most productive in both manners. Feeling encouraged that this pioneering study may stimulate similar analyses in other environments and that intercropping annual legume and brassicas may play a large-scale role in diverse cropping systems, our team is heading a detailed examination of various extended research.
