GROWTH PERFORMANCE OF WEST AFRICAN DWARF GROWING RAMS FED PANICUM MAXIMUM SUPPLEMENTED WITH DIFFERENTLY PROCESSED CAJANUS CAJAN LEAVES
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.51791/njap.vi.7619Keywords:
Tropical grass, Processed Cajanus cajan forages, WAD rams, Performance characteristicsAbstract
An experiment was carried out to investigate the Performance of West African dwarf growing rams fed differently processed Cajanus cajan leaves and Panicum maximum basal diet for 56 days feeding trial which was carried out at Teaching and Research Farm of Oyo State College of Agriculture and Technology Igboora, Nigeria. A total of sixteen (16) growing WAD rams were randomly allocated to four treatments with four animals per treatment while two animals served as replicate. The experimental diet was fed at 3% body weight of individual animals while fresh, wilted, and dried forms of Cajanus cajan leaves supplemented at varied inclusion levels. There were significant (P<0.05) difference in all parameters measured expect dry matter intake (DMI) and feed conversion ratio (FCR) which showed no significant (P>0.05) difference across the dietary treatments. The results revealed that animals on the control diet recorded the least weight gain (12.68g/day) while the highest weight gain (25.89g/day) was recorded in T3 that contained 30% wilted form of Cajanus Cajan leaves and 70% Panicum maximum. The daily weight gain of animals was significantly different across all treatments (P<0.05). The highest DMI (5.22kg) was recorded on the control treatment (T1) that contained 100% sole Panicum maximum and the least value of DMI (3.50kg) was recorded in T2 that contained 30% fresh form of Cajanus cajan leaves and 70% Panicum maximum. The highest feed efficiency ratio (0.29) and the lowest value (0.11) were observed in animals fed T2, T3, and T1 diets respectively. It can be concluded that the animals on T3 had the highest feed utilization while animals on T3 had the highest dry matter intake.
