Effect of different proportions of alfalfa hay and oak";s leaf on mohair production by markhoze goats US

This study was conducted to investigate the nutritive value of oak"s tree leaf as animal feed and study the effects of different proportions of alfalfa (AF) and oak"s leaf (OL) on the growth performance and mohair production of Markhoze goat of Kurdistan in west Iran. At the first stage of this study , oak"s leaf was sampled from 30 cities of Baneh and Marvian area and chemically analyzed . In vivo digestibility of mixed sample was determined , using of 4 head of goat . At the second stage , a completely randomized block design with 5 treatments (diet) and two blocks (sex) was conducted in which , 5 diets were tested on 25 male and 25 female Markhoze goats for six months. The diets were : A) 100 OL , B) 25 OL + 75 AF , C) 50 OL + 50 AF , D) 75 OL + 25 AF and E) 100 AF that were fed ad libitum. The results obtained from chemical composition indicated that the CP, Ash , EE , Ca , P content were 7.3±0.76, 3.7±0.46 percent and GE was 4270.3±32.56 kcal/kg of OL (DM basis) . The digestibility of OM, CP, EE and NFE were 38.4±5.2, 27.4 ± 6.16, 27.8±21.4 and 38.4±15.2 percent respectively . Regarding the feeding trial , results showed that substitution of OL with AF significantly (P 0.05) affected the DM intake , growth rate , and mohair production in both male and female . in all mention measurements , diet A showed the lowest amounts where , the goats received diets contained AF did not shown significant (P 0.05) variation in most of the parameters. The differences between males and females were statistically (P 0.05) significant for the most of measurements , so that male goats consumed more feed and showed higher growth rate and mohair yield . In may be concluded that alfalfa hay could be a good source of forage for mohair goat and better performance may be obtained from feeding alfalfa than oak"s tree leaf however , a mixture of 50 : 50 alfalfa and oak"s tree leaf will be a good forage for this animal.