Estimating the digestibility of Sahelian roughages from faecal crude protein concentration of cattle and small ruminants

Studies on diet selection and feed intake of ruminants in extensive grazing systems often require the use of simple approaches to determine the organic matter digestibility (OMD) of the ingested feed. Therefore, we evaluated the validity of the one-factorial exponential regression established by Lukas et al. [Journal of Animal Science 83 (2005) 1332], which estimates OMD from the faecal crude protein (FCP) concentration. The equation was applied to two sets of data obtained with free grazing and pen-fed cattle, sheep and goats ingesting low and high amounts of green and dry vegetation of Sahelian pastures as well as millet leaves and cowpea hay. Data analysis showed that the livestock species did not influence the precision of estimation of OMD from FCP. For the linear regression between measured and estimated OMD (%) across n = 431 individual observations, a regression coefficient of r² = 0.65 and a residual standard deviation (RSD) of 5.87 were obtained. The precision of estimation was influenced by the data set (p = 0.033), the type of feed (p < 0.001) and the feeding level (p = 0.009), and interactions occurred between type of feed and feeding level (p = 0.021). Adjusting the intercept and the slope of the established exponential function to the present data resulted in a compression of the curve; while r² remained unchanged, the RSD of the regression between measured and estimated OMD was reduced, when compared with the results obtained from the equation of Lukas et al. (2005). Estimating OMD from treatment means of FCP greatly improved the correlation between measured and estimated OMD for both the established function and the newly fit equation. However, if anti-nutritional dietary factors increase the concentration of faecal nitrogen from feed or endogenous origin, the approach might considerably overestimate diet digestibility.