Prediction of Feed Intake and Its Relationships with Chemical.pdfVIP

Open Journal of Animal Sciences, 2015, 5, 283-293 Published Online July 2015 in SciRes. /journal/ojas /10.4236/ojas.2015.53033 Prediction of Feed Intake and Its Relationships with Chemical Composition of Diets in Goats Consuming Concentrate, Bahiagrass Pasture and Mimosa Browse * B. R. Min , S. Solaiman Department of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, Tuskegee University, Tuskegee, USA * Email: minb@ Received 5 May 2015; accepted 6 July 2015; published 9 July 2015 Copyright © 2015 by authors and Scientific Research Publishing Inc. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution International License (CC BY). /licenses/by/4.0/ Abstract An indoor and a grazing experiment was conducted to determine how estimated feed intake and digestion by grazing goats consuming concentrate, bahaigrass pasture, and mimosa browse changed with body weight (BW), level of supplementation, and forage chemical composition. Twenty four Boer wether goats were assigned in a completely randomized design with repeated measures on the following 3 treatments: concentrate, mimosa browse, and bahiagrass pasture. Internal mark- ers used to estimate both dry matter (DM) digestibility (DMD) and DM intake (DMI) included acid detergent lignin (ADL) and acid insoluble ash (AIA). Marker-derived estimates of DMD and DMI were compared with DMD measured by total fecal collection or directly measured by in vivo feed intake rate. Both ADL and AIA-based markers in mimosa and bahiagrass diets were similar from those derived by in vivo DMD; however, AIA-based marker in concentrate was under-estimated (P 0.01). These results indicate that ADL and AIA indigestible markers performed similarly to in