Hello Everyone, this was very interesting indeed...
I live in south africa and mulberry exists is most suburban gardens as the birds just drop seeds as they go... We have some wild growing ones along roadsides that go to 60ft tall with impressive spans... I grew up with one with a trunk so thick 2 men could hug around it... The variety i have come across mostly is the red, white being rare and black also...
What i want to add is that i have also seen the research done on animal feed and decided to try it on my alternative livestock... My snail farm... And i can vouch for a digestibility of 80 to 90% digestible biomass...
What i did to prepare the leaves esp for winter and for ease of feeding was to hand harvest 50lbs of leaves at a time and dry them in my solar dehydrator, the leaves lose 80% weight during this prosess. The dry material was rhen ground down with a flail mill to about 1 - 1.5mm powder and added as a "green" to the snail feed... What i noticed was an immediate drop in feed intake and also less droppings because of the digestibility, so they would eat untill full up and then not eat again as often as the mulberry would be digesting... Then the droppings were far less obviously because they use more and pass less... This saved me time in that i did not have to feed daily and also spent less time cleaning... The other thing i noticed was a marked increase in egg laying due to the high calcium content of mulberry... (Calsium is the holy grail miniral in snail farming)
I have plans this year to build a pelletizer and start producing a micro pellet to make feeding even more streamlined... But mulberry is now a vital part to my opperation...
As to the question of coppice vs. Pollarding... I collect all my leaves from a single wild roadside tree that the city council simply mows over with a tractor slasher... So its coppiced and it regrows vigorously every season... It started with 1 then 10 now it probably has 50 or 60 shoots and counting... Its a mighty bush... And i can stand next to it and bend over a shoot and strip it into a bag no problem... The shoots go to about 8ft per season...
Regards
Neil Engelbrecht.
