Abstract

A rapidly growing world population will demand a secure and increased global food supply in the future. Ruminant animals can utilize fibrous plant material not edible to humans efficiently and convert it into highly nutritious food for human consumption. A large number of by-products from the agricultural industry can thereby be suitable feed ingredients in diets to dairy cows. However, the use of agro-industrial by-products in feed rations to dairy cows have to be complementary to basal feed ingredients/efficient in terms of nutrient utilization and not lower production. Several in vitro techniques have been developed to enable rapid and cost-effective evaluation of feed resources as alternative to experiments with live animals. Recently, there has been great progress in the development of the automated gas in vitro technique, which enables comparison of treatment effects on diet digestibility, ruminal fermentation, digestion rate (kd; Huhtanen et al., 2008) and CH4 production (Ramin and Huhtanen, 2012). The aim of this study was to evaluate the effects of replacement of barley by some common agro-industrial by-products in diets based on grass silage on true organic matter digestibility (TOMD), volatile fatty acids (VFA) concentrations, diet kd and CH4 production in vitro.

Keywords

dairy cows; feed; agro-industrial by-products

Published in

Rapport / Sveriges lantbruksuniversitet, Institutionen för husdjurens utfodring och vård
2017, number: 296, pages: 146-150
Book title: Proceedings of the 8th Nordic Feed Science Conference, Uppsala, Sweden
Publisher: Department of Animal Nutrition and Management, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences

Conference

8 th Nordic Feed Science Conference 2017

Authors' information