Chemical composition of corn silage produced by scientific studies in Brazil - A meta-analysis

Abstract

The objective of the present study was to perform a meta-analysis that compared the chemical composition of corn silage produced for different experimental purposes, i.e., by research groups that studied corn silage (SCS) or by research groups that only used corn silage (UCS) as a form of roughage. We analyzed 203 papers that were published between January 1994 and December 2014 and contained a total of 647 treatments and the analysis of 1701 silos. We found a significant difference (P < 0.0001) in the dry matter (DM) content of SCS silage (33.00%) and that of UCS silage (30.64%). The DM contents of neutral detergent fiber for the SCS and UCS silage were high (54.72 and 55.14% DM, respectively) but were not significantly different from one another (P = 0.5936), and the acid detergent fiber content of the UCS silage (31.04% DM) was higher than that of the SCS silage (29.65%, P = 0.0214), which indicated that the UCS silage was less digestible than the SCS silage. This was also corroborated (P = 0.0064) by the mean content of total digestible nutrients (64.18% DM) in the UCS silage, which likely results from the lower level of care taken when using standard silage production methods, compared to that taken by SCS researchers. Therefore, we concluded that the corn silage produced by research groups in Brazil are not analyzed in full and that, as a result, there is a paucity of important information, such as the content of organic acids. In addition, we also found that corn silage produced in Brazil contains a high level of neutral detergent fiber.