An experiment was carried out during 1984 to study the effect of treating grass at ensiling with three commercially available inoculant-type additives {H/M Inoculant, Grass Sile and Siron), formic acid (850 g kg"'; Add-F) or no additive on grass preservation, in-silo loss, intake and animal performance. Primary growth grass ensiled from 28-29 May into concrete-walled covered silos was of high dry matter (DM, 234 g kg"'), water-soluble carbohydrate content (WSC. 212 g kg DM"') and digestibility (MADF, 250 g kg DM " ').The untreated silage displayed good preservation and with the exception of the Sirontreated silage which showed significantly lower buffering capacity (Be) and volatile fatty acid (VFA) contents than the untreated silage, the application of inoculant-type additives did not improve silage preservation or decrease in-silo DM losses. The formic acid-treated silage displayed significantly lower Be, water-soluble carbohydrate, ash, ammonia nitrogen (g kg total N"') and lactate contents than the untreated silage.After a 133 d storage period, silages were offered to finishing beef cattle for an 84-d period. Cattle offered the silages displayed similar and non-significant daily DM intakes, daily liveweight gains, dressing proportions and daily carcass gains. From this experiment it appears unlikely that any of the additives evaluated will improve animal performance relative to a well-preserved untreated silage.

Two 2×2 factorial experiments are described in which a bacterial inoculant being developed as a silage additive and containing a strain of Lacto‐bacillus plantarum (Ecosyl, ICI plc) was evaluated at two harvests (18 July and 30 September 1985) of two swards (perennial ryegrass and permanent pasture) in difficult ensiling conditions. On each occasion erbage was ensiled with and without inoculant using two 0·5–t capacity steel tower silos per treatment. The contents of the two replicate silos per treatment were combined for feeding to cross‐bred wethers in digestibility and metabolizable energy (ME) partition studies. Overall, inoculated herbage declined in pH post‐harvest at a faster rate than control herbage (p<0·001) and three out of the four inoculated silages had lower pH, ammonia‐N, acetate and alcohol and higher residual soluble carbohydrate content (p<0·001) than control. Significantly higher digestibility of nutrients (P<0·05) was found in three of the inoculant‐treated silages and these also had significantly higher ME values than control (P<0·001), (10·58 and 8·77 MJ kg tol DM−1 for the treated and untreated silages respectively). The use of inoculant on herbage of only moderate ensiling potential therefore, produced significant improvements in fermentation quality and feeding value over control.

SummaryIn research into competition between individual cultivars of one perennial grass species sown in mixtures, fixed matrix designs have been widely used because of difficulties in identifying the components inanatural sward.Extrapolation of results from such fixed designs to the sward situation is often difficult in any but the short-term context.This paper describes the principles, requirements and use of an electrophoretic technique together with a mathematical concept which can be used to distinguish certain perennial ryegrass cultivars when sown in mixtures. Such methods have useful implications for the study of sward composition and competitive ability of ryegrass cultivars sown in mixtures. The number of samples required to study selected 2-way cultivar mixtures using this method is indicated.

In recent years, it has been shown that falsification of online reviews can have a substantial, quantifiable effect on the success of the subject. This creates a large enticement for sellers to participate in review deception to boost their own success, or hinder the competition. Most current efforts to detect review deception are based on supervised classifiers trained on syntactic and lexical patterns. However, recent neural approaches to classification have been shown to match or outperform state-of-the-art methods. In this paper, we perform an analytic comparison of these methods, and introduce our own results. By fine-tuning Google's recently published transformer-based architecture, BERT, on the fake review detection task, we demonstrate near state-of-the-art performance, achieving over 90% accuracy on a widely used deception detection dataset.

Two 2x3 factorial design experiments were conducted during 1985 to compare the effect of treating grass at ensiling with a silage inoculant (Imperial Chemical Industries pic) or formic acid with an untreated control, on fermentation, insilo losses, intake and performance of finishing cattle.In experiment 1, three covered concrete-walled silos were each filled with approximately 70 t of primary growth, unwilted herbage at each of two cutting dates, 20-21 May (early harvest) and 3 June 1985 (late harvest). In experiment 2, the above procedure was repeated for second regrowth grass with two cutting dates, 30 September-1 October (early harvest) and 16-21 October 1985 (late harvest). The water-soluble carbohydrate (WSC) contents of the herbage were low in both, being 130-160 and 121-137 g kg-' DM for the first and second experiments respectively. In both experiments the formic acidtreated silages attained lower temperatures than Correspondence: Dr S, J, Kennedy, Experimental Husbandry Department, Greenmount College of Agriculture and Horticulture, Antrim BT41 4PU, Northern Ireland, UK, the inoculant-treated and untreated silages. At both harvests in experiment 1 the pH, ammonia nitrogen CNH3N) and volatile fatty acid (VFA) contents of the inoculant-treated and formic acidtreated silages were significantly lower than those in the untreated silage. However, at the early harvest in experiment 2 the pH and NH3N contents of the inoculant-treated silage were significantly higher than those in the two other silages. At the late harvest in experiment 2 the inoculant-treated and the formic acid-treated silages had significantly lower pH and VFA contents than the untreated silage.After 126 d and 98 d storage periods in experiments 1 and 2 respectively, each of the six silages was offered to twelve 475 kg steers throughout a 70-d period (experiment I) and a 63-d period (experiment 2). In exf>eriment 1 there were no significant effects of additive on silage DM intake, liveweight gain or carcass gain with the mean carcass gains being 0 49, 0-51 and 0 52±0 024kgd-' for the untreated, formic acidtreated and inoculant-treated silages respectively. In experiment 2 the mean silage DM intakes were 634, 7 33 and 660±0151 kg d"' and carcass gains were 0 27, 0 35 and 0 26±0 026 kg d"' for the untreated, formic acid-treated and inoculanttreated silages respectively, formic acid treatment thus gave the most consistent results.