Utilização de subprodutos para alimentação de ovinos na região Amazônica.

Abstract

The research on alternative food available regionally for ruminant feeding is an important area of animal nutrition aimed at diversifying diets and lowering production costs. Thus, the thesis was developed at the Federal Rural University of the Amazon, Campus of Parauapebas, Brazil, to verify the possibility of using regional foods purchased at a lower cost than the traditional foods used and thus constitute a low cost nutritional plan for producers. The research was developed from three experiments, in order to characterize and test the in situ degradability of dry matter (DM), neutral detergent fiber (NDF) and crude protein (CP) of the by-products of African oil palm (cake, nut and fiber), macauba palm (pulp cake and nut cake), açai palm (açaí seed), babassu (nut cake), pineapple (skin, crown and residue silage). The tests were performed with ten sheep fistulated in the rumen and distributed in experimental design composed of two 5x5 Latin squares (5 periods x 5 treatments) as to determine the consumption and digestibility of the nutrients, nitrogen balance and ruminal parameters fed with diets containing different contents (0; 26,66; 53,33 and 80%) of babassu cak, where the roughage was formed by pineapple residue silage with an additional treatment. We have also evaluated, in the third experiment, (applying the same delineation as for experiment 2), the microbial production, efficiency at microbial production, the concentration of volatile fatty acids and qualification and identification of protozoa present in the ruminal liquid. In the fourth experiment, we evaluated the behavior of sheep fed with babassu cake as a replacement to elephant grass silage. The experiment was performed on 45 sheep allocated in individual bays with freely available food and distributed in fully randomized design with five treatments (inclusion of 0, 12.5, 25, 37.5 and 50% of babassu cake) and nine repetitions, where all treatments obeyed the roughage:concentrate ratio of 40:60. Based on the chemical composition and in situ degradability among the ingredients tested, the African oil palm nut, macauba pulp cake and pineapple residue silage presented the best characteristics of crude protein. On the other hand, a the African oil palm nut, macauba nut cake and pineapple residue silage presented the best characteristics of roughage foods. We also verified that the babassu cake can replace the soybean meal in up to 80% when the roughage source is the pineapple residue silage. The use of pineapple residue silage improves the consumption and digestibility of nutrients, intake, retention and absorption of nitrogen, without compromising the ruminal parameters of sheep and without affecting the efficiency of the microbial protein synthesis, production and count of FVA and identification of ruminal protozoa. The babassu cake can replace the elephant grass silage in up to 50% without altering the total feeding and chewing time, which leads to an improvement in the efficiency of the feeding and rumination.