Performance, nutritive value and production cost of barley fodder produced in hydroponic system
2010
Golmohammadi , H. A.
This research was conducted to study the performance, nutritive value and to analyze costs of barley fodder production in hydroponics' system and to determine its feeding value. A fodder production plan was carried out, using of a growing chamber (GC) sized 4×3×2.7m in which temperature was adjusted from 20°C (night time) to 24 °C (day time), and relative humidity was about 60-65% with lighting regime 14h/day. The irrigation time was 20 second every 4 hours and water 2000 liters of water were used per week. The growing period was adjusted for 6 days then the fresh forage was harvested for chemical composition and feeding trial. Average fresh fodder yield was 5.61 Kg per kg of barley seed during a 6 day production cycle. The DM content was 19.1% in green fodder and CP, NDF, ADF, Ca and P were 13.6, 31.3, 14.4, 0.32 and 0.41% on DM basis respectively. In a completely randomized design, performance of male calves was studied by comparing of green fodder with barley grain in the feeding trial. Eighteen male calves, with initial weight of 187±5.4 kg, were divided in to two groups and allocated to the control or experimental diet. The control diet contained 24% barley grain but in the experimental diet, barley grain was partially replaced with green fodder. Average daily body weight gain was 1297 and 1256 g for the experimental and control groups respectively that were not significantly different. Average daily dry matter intake was 7.06 and 6.56kg, feed conversion ratio was 5.53 and 5.30 for the experimental and control groups respectively that were not significantly different between the treatments. It is concluded that feeding performance of barley green fodder is similar to barley grain in fattening calves.
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