Effect of Inclusion of Albizia saman Pods in the Diet on the Performances of Dairy Cows
- 1 University of Veterinary Science, Myanmar
- 2 Fishery and Rural Development, Myanmar
Abstract
Ruminants can achieve high productivity when the diet includes concentrates; however these are often expensive due to competition with humans and mono-gastric animals. This experiment was conducted to determine the effect of partial inclusion of Albizia saman pods (ASP) in a Commercial Concentrate (CC) on the performances of dairy cows. Twelve cross-bred Holstein Friesian cows (472±13 kg) in the 12th week of lactation were randomly allocated into four treatment groups with three replicates accoding to the completely randomized design. The four treatments were control diet-CD [35% urea-treated-rice-straw (URS; 79g crude protein (CP)/ kg dry matter (DM)) and 65% CC (contained 40% cottonseed cake, 35% broken chickpea and 25% chickpea husk on an as fed basis and provided 200g CP/kg DM)], D1[35% URS + 60% CC + 5% ASP (189g CP/kg DM)], D2 (35% URS +55% CC + 10% ASP) and D3 (35% URS + 50% CC + 15% ASP). Cows were fed treatments for 60 days. Dry matter intake was significantly higher (p<0.05) for cows in the D3 treatment compared with the other three treatments, however there were no significant differences in the DM digestibility of treatments. Nitrogen intake and faecal-nitrogen of cows offered the D3 treatment were significantly higher (p<0.05) than those of cows offered the other three treatments. In contrast urine-nitrogen and nitrogen utilization were not significantly different among the treatments. The average milk yield (4% fat-corrected-milk) increased as the percentage of ASP was increased in the diets, however the composition of milk did not differ significantly between treatments. The costs of TDN/kg and per kg of milk was highest for the CD treatment and the lowest was found in D3 treatment (p<0.05). These results suggest that Albizia saman pods could be replace up to 15% of the commercial concentrate fed to lactating Holstein Friesian cross-bred cows without detrimental effects.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3844/ajavsp.2016.41.46
Copyright: © 2016 Min Aung, Yin Yin Kyawt, Moe Thida Htun, Khin San Mu and Aung Aung. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
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Keywords
- Albizia saman Pods
- Digestibility
- Nitrogen Utilization
- Milk Yield