Abstract
It was evaluated intake, total apparent digestibility, performance and feeding behavior of bovine fed diets constituted of corn silage, crushed sugar cane given fresh or crushed and given 72 hours after storage, ensilaged sugar cane with or without 1% of calcium oxide and concentrate at the proportion of 1% of the body weight. It was used 35 bovines, distributed in a random block design, with 5 treatments and 6 repetitions. The animals were housed in collective stalls with troughs individualized by electronic gates. The animals fed diet with corn silage presented greater intake of all nutrients and greater total digestibility of dry matter, organic matter, neutral detergent fiber and total digestible nutrients, as well as greater weight gain and subcutaneous fat thickness. Animals fed diet with fresh sugar cane presented greater nutrient intake as well as better dry matter digestibility, ether extract and TDN content and a superior performance in relation to animals fed ensilaged sugar cane diets. Animals fed silage of sugar cane with calcium oxide presented greater digestibility of organic matter, NFC and content of TDN but they did not differ on performance in relation to the use of silage of sugar cane without calcium oxide. Intake and performance of animals did not change with or without storage of sugar cane. It was concluded that animals fed diets with corn silage present performances superior to the ones which are fed sugar cane based diets, and animals fed fresh sugar diet are superior to the animals fed diets with sugar cane silage.
Highlights
Sugar cane (Saccharum officinarum L.) has been used for a long time as forage culture by Brazilian farmers, assuming an important role as source of supplemental roughage
Nutrient intake of diet was greater (P
The greater neutral detergent fiber digestibility (Table 2) is a factor that can result in a higher rumen passage rate, increasing animal intake capacity
Summary
Sugar cane (Saccharum officinarum L.) has been used for a long time as forage culture by Brazilian farmers, assuming an important role as source of supplemental roughage. In detriment to nutritive value of sugar cane silage, ethanol production is the principal difficulty presented by this technology and the greatest challenge of research searching for specific processes which control properly the population and activity of yeast, without harming quality of silage and animal performance (Nussio et al, 2003). To solve this problem, calcium oxide (CaO) has been used at different levels, being the level 0.5% able to promote improvement in the quality of ensilaged material (Baleiro Neto et al, 2009)
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