Introduction

　　Recently, as the effect of international agricultural tendency, forage crop production was oppressed by the food crops and the energy crops. Consequently, the requirement for domestic forage increase multiplely. Furthermore, the planting area of forage crops increased rapidly since the positive farmland policy, such as ‘small landowners large tenant policy’ and ‘the continuous fallow reactivation’, promoted in these years. For these reasons, there are urgent demands from farmers on new forage cultivars and production technologies, so forage research and extension has become an importment duty of LRI. The missions of LRI on forage crops are included forage breeding, improvement of forage management and utilization, evaluation and monitoring of forage quality, and extension of elite forage varieties and superior technologies of forage production.