Fattening beef cattle with silage from the sweet corn waste
1996
Sornthep Tumwasorn | Prasong Climee | Worapong Pirunsarn (Kasetsart Univ., Bangkok (Thailand). Faculty of Agriculture. Dept. of Animal Science)
Two feeding trials were conducted in this experiment through the use of agro-industry waste from a sweet corn factory. Experiment no.1 employed 4 rations of silage: 1) the control ration of plain silage; 2) silage mixed with 3 percent urea and 3 percent molasses; 3)silage mixed with 1.5 percent urea and 3 percent molasses; 4) silage mixed with 3 percent rice bran. The protein content obtained from the four feeding ration averaged 7.76, 13.99, 10.74 and 8.79 percent with 80.45, 77.83, 77.05 and 75.71 percent moisture, respectively. The acid detergent fiber (ADF) and neutral detergent fiber (NDF) were found to be in the normal range. Twenty-four beef steers of a Brahman crossbred were allocated at random to these 4 feed rations. Heart girth and predicted body weight were obtained at the beginning and at the end of the experiment for the data analysis. Maximum yield was obtained from feeding ration no.2 and the fattening steers gained an averaged of 448 g/head/day during a one-month feeding trial. The control ration yielded an average of 220 g/head/day whereas the average daily gain obtained from feed no.3 and no.4 were 335 and 287 g, respectively. The second experiment was conducted for another one month using the control ration and an additional ration that contained 0.5 percent urea and 1.5 percent molasses in the silage ration. The second ration contained 11.34 percent protein and 77.67 percent moisture with a normal ADF and NDF percentage. The results from experiment no.2 showed that the control group gained 255 g/day as compared to 365 g/head/day of the group from silage ration no.5. In general, the feed quality obtained from the sweet corn waste silage in this experiment had 25 percent more percent crude protein and 50 percent less feed cost per kg as compared to urea-molasses treated rice straw, the common roughage source for fattening steers in Thailand.
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