پالپ مرکبات و کاه گندم سیلاژ به عنوان عناصر رژیم غذایی بره
Abstract
1. Introduction
2. Materials and methods
3. Results and discussion
4. Conclusions
Acknowledgements
References
Abstract
Twenty “Merinizzata Italiana” lambs were introduced to two experimental diets. Ten animals (five males and five females, control group) received the traditional diet that is supplied by farmers in southern Italy, which comprised of oat hay ad libitum and commercial concentrate. The second group (the same number of lambs, silage group) received citrus pulp and wheat straw silage ad libitum and 70% of the commercial concentrate supplied to the control group. The animals were slaughtered after 80 days of feeding and carcass and some meat quality parameters were measured. No differences were observed for live weight between treatments, and carcass weights were similar for the two diets, but with obvious differences between sexes. Animals on silage produced carcasses with a better muscular conformation and with a lower fatness score (P<0.05). Subcutaneous fat colour was influenced by sex, being lighter in the female carcasses (P<0.05). Dissection of different anatomical parts showed a higher percentage of lean and a lower proportion of fat in silage samples compared to control ones. Ultimate pH was highly affected by sex being higher in the samples from male lambs (P<0.01), but was unaffected by diet treatment. Diet tended to affect meat shear force value which was lower in the silage samples, although, samples from all the animals were extremely tender. Meat from silage samples had a higher water content (P<0.05). Overall, in our experimental conditions, the use of citrus pulp silage seemed to be economically convenient for producing animals with substantially unmodified carcass and meat quality characteristics.
Introduction
Citrus pulp is a by-product widely available in Mediterranean countries and its cost is relatively low compared to its nutritive value (Guessous et al., 1989). This by-product contains a relatively high amount of pectin and soluble carbohydrates, and for this reason dried citrus pulp has been used to replace cereals in ruminant diets (Bhattacharya and Harb, 1973; Hadjipanayiotou and Louca, 1976). However, citrus pulp has also some roughage-like characteristics (Ben-Ghedalia et al., 1989) and low amount of nitrogen (Lanza, 1982).