Nutritive value of cabbage and pelleted complete feed in free-ranged organic growing rabbit.

International audience

English. Free-ranged organic rabbit correspond to the consumer’s demand of improved animal welfare conditions, but lacks intechnical reference values and nutritive value of plants available at farm. We thus studied the digestibility of cabbage(broccoli, leaf stage) and of commercial pelleted feed for three groups of 5 growing rabbits (74 days old, mean liveweight = 1,830 g) housed individually in movable cages on pasture and following organic regulation for rabbit farming.Each cage had a shelter of 0.4 m2 and a pasturing surface of 1.2 m2 . The group C was fed only with cabbage (500g fresh on morning and on evening), the group P with pelleted feed only, and the group CP was fed with cabbage +60 g/d of pelleted feed. After one week of adaptation to movable cage and feeds (74-81 d old), the digestibility wasmeasured for four days, with feed intake and faecal total collection measurement (a board was installed on the cagefloor to collect the faeces). During digestibility period, the dry matter (DM) intake of cabbage averaged 95.5 g/dper rabbit of the group C, corresponding to a daily fresh intake of 664 g. Pellet intake of the P group averaged 240g DM/d, while in CP group the cabbage intake averaged only 54.5 g DM/d for a pellet intake of 53.9 g DM/d. Thecabbage contained a high content of ash (19.4%) for a protein content of 18.4% and a fibre content of 23.1% of NDFand 16.6%ADF and 4.5% ADL. Organic matter (OM) digestibility of cabbage was very high (85.0%) as well as forcrude protein and energy digestibility (85.4 and 81.7% respectively). Cabbage digestible protein and energy content(direct measure), fed alone, thus averaged 158 g PD/kg and 12.16 MJ DE/kg. The commercial pellet nutritive content(group P) was moderate (9 g PD/kg and 8.76 MJ DE/kg). When the cabbage was fed freely and complemented by60 g/d of pellets (group CP), the DM digestibility was reduced proportionally to the pellet intake (49.7% of the totalintake), and averaged 65.9%, similar to that recalculated from C and P values (67.8%). Thus, mixing cabbage withpelleted feed did not alter the nutritive value of the cabbage