4. Inferior quality roughages???
Inferior quality roughages are dry fibrous crop residues
having very poor nutritive value.
Such roughages include: wheat straw, rice straw, millet
stovar and barley straw and stover of sorghum and maize
etc.
8. Several nonconventional dry roughages are used for the
feeding of animals like cereal/legume crop residues,
bagasse and fallen tree, leaves etc.
But their utilization by the ruminants is limited due to
Low voluntary intake
Poor digestibility
Deficient crude protein
Lower level of essential minerals and vitamins
Presence of certain antinutritional factors like:
lignin
silica
oxalates and tannins
9. That results
Poor animal performance
Low growth rate
Reduced fertility
High mortality
Incidence of disease and parasitism
15. Soaking
• Dry roughages are dipped in the water for more than 2-3
hours.
• Process of mixing or spraying water on roughages make
them soft.
• While mixing of concentrates with roughages also improves
the feed intake and digestibility.
19. Chopping (Chaffing)
• The fodders are cut into 1-4 cm small pieces.
• Device used for chopping is known as chaff cutter.
• Chaff cutter used for fodder chopping is selected on the
basis of quantity of fodder to be chopped.
• For small quantity a hand chaff cutter is used whereby the
fodder is hold in the left hand and chopped with chaff cutter
hold in right hand.
20. Chopping (Chaffing)
• For moderately large amount of up to 5 quintals, a manually
operated chaff cutter is used.
• For large amount of several tones the power operated large
size chaff cutter is used.
• Chopping improves digestion due to exposure of relatively
large surface area of roughages for microbial digestion.
35. Irradiation
• High energy radiations like X-rays and gamma rays are applied.
• That improves the digestibility by
*breaking the cellulose and hemicellulose bonds (Polysaccharides)
*formation of simple sugars (mono/oligosaccharides) which can
easily be utilized by rumen mico-organisms.
• Forage lignin resists the X-rays.
• Moreover, irradiation also results ergosterol (plant sterol)
Calciferol (Vit.D3)
38. Grinding
• Dried fodders are converted into small uniform particles
• Device used for grinding is known as grinder
• Grinding of roughages improve the feed consumption,
digestibility and some extent the growth rate
53. Pelleting
• Densification of feed to a specific shape, with or without
application of moisture / steam.
• It improves the consumption of poor quality roughages.
• A complete feed is made by pelleting poor quality roughage
with 30 percent concentrates.
• The size of pellets may be variable.
