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Digestion in the stomach and intestines of sheep receiving diets of red clover silage with various supplements
Author(s) -
THOMAS P. C.,
CHAMBERLAIN D. G.,
ALWASH A. H.
Publication year - 1976
Publication title -
grass and forage science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.716
H-Index - 56
eISSN - 1365-2494
pISSN - 0142-5242
DOI - 10.1111/j.1365-2494.1976.tb00784.x
Subject(s) - latin square , rumen , silage , digestion (alchemy) , urea , zoology , red clover , meal , dry matter , biology , organic matter , agronomy , chemistry , food science , fermentation , biochemistry , chromatography , ecology
Three castrated male sheep fitted with rumen and duodenal re‐entrant cannulae were used in a 3×3 Latin Square experiment to investigate the digestion of three diets of red clover silage with supplementary concentrates containing barley or barley and groundnut meal or barley and urea. The supplements were designed to be isocaloric and the groundnut meal and barley‐urea mixtures to be isonitrogenous. There were no significant ( P >0.05) differences between treatments in the digestibility of organic matter (mean value 71.2%) or in the percentage of dietary organic matter digested in the stomach (mean value 53.6%) and diiferences between treatments in the concentrations of total and individual short‐chain fatty acids in the rumen were small. The nitrogen intake for the barley treatment was 19.41 g/d and that for the groundnut meal and barley‐urea treatments were 23.36 g/d and 23.05 g/d respectively. Corresponding figures for the duodenal flows of nitrogen were 21.97 g/d, 21.48 g/d and 21.14 g/d and for the faecal losses of nitrogen were 7.09 g/d, 6.98 g/d and 6.92 g/d. As a consequence, although the diets supplied quite different amounts of digestible crude protein they supplied similar amounts of crude protein digested in the intestines.