Abstract
Our objective was to investigate the effect of the replacement of aruana grass by gliricidia on the fermentative losses, chemical composition, and aerobic stability of silages. For ensiling, whole-crop aruana grass (75 d of growth) was chopped (275 g kg-1 dry matter - DM) and ensiled alone or associated with gliricidia (270 g kg-1 DM; 150 d of growth). For gliricidia, we used only the leaves and stalks to ensile. The evaluated treatments were different ratios of aruana grass to gliricidia (100:0, 75:25, 50:50, 25:75, and 0:100), with four replicates (mini-silos). The silage composed only of gliricidia exhibited a lower pH than the other silages. Dry matter recovery was not affected by the treatments, although effluent losses were affected. The replacement of aruana grass by gliricidia 50% at ensiling resulted in a higher lactic acid bacteria count. The aruana grass silages displayed lower protein contents and a higher neutral detergent fiber content than the gliricidia silages after 40 d of fermentation. Consequently, the silage consisting of 100% gliricidia showed higher in vitro DM digestibility, presenting an increase of 8.13% after 40 d of fermentation compared with 100% of aruana grass silage. After silo opening, the gliricidia silage was very stable (>72 h). The low quality of aruana grass silage is improved by replacing this grass with significant amounts of gliricidia (approximately 75%).
Highlights
Aruana grass is a species of the genus Panicum maximum used mainly as pasture in Brazil (Gerdes et al, 2005) that exhibits high productivity throughout the year, mainly in the summer (Pompeu et al, 2010)
The silage consisting of 100% gliricidia showed higher in vitro dry matter (DM) digestibility, presenting an increase of 8.13% after 40 d of fermentation compared with 100% of aruana grass silage
It is difficult to ensure good silage quality using only tropical grasses because these forages usually exhibit a low amount of water-soluble carbohydrates (WSC), a high buffering capacity, low lactic acid bacteria (LAB) count, and low dry matter (DM) and protein contents at cutting (McDonald et al, 1991; Bergamaschine et al, 2006; Keady et al, 2008)
Summary
Aruana grass is a species of the genus Panicum maximum used mainly as pasture in Brazil (Gerdes et al, 2005) that exhibits high productivity throughout the year, mainly in the summer (Pompeu et al, 2010). It is difficult to ensure good silage quality using only tropical grasses because these forages usually exhibit a low amount of water-soluble carbohydrates (WSC), a high buffering capacity, low lactic acid bacteria (LAB) count, and low dry matter (DM) and protein contents at cutting (McDonald et al, 1991; Bergamaschine et al, 2006; Keady et al, 2008). As an alternative to overcome these problems, some legumes can be used to improve the silage quality of grasses by increasing the protein and WSC contents (Copani et al, 2014) and reducing the costs associated with traditional protein sources in animal nutrition (e.g., soybean) (Santos et al, 2009). The quality of corn, pangola grass, and setaria silage is improved by the addition of gliricidia (Tjandraatmadja et al, 1994; Kato et al, 2006), presumably leading to superior animal performance (Costa et al, 2007)
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