Capim elefante, cana-de-açúcar e farelo de arroz integral na alimentação de ovinos confinados.

Abstract

The sheep industry is consolidating itself as one of the main activities in the sector of animal production. However, studies on sheep feeding and nutrition are still needed in order to hetter development and improvement of nutrition techniques that enahle continued growth of the activity. In this sense, this work was developed with ohjective to evaluate the effects of diets, hased on elephant grass or sugarcane as roughage and corn meai or rice hran as energy concentrate, on performance and hody composition in terms of diet intake and digestihility. A total of 30 undefined hreed (UB), castrated male sheep with 19,77+1,99 kg initial hody weight (BW) were used. Six animais were slaughtered at the onset of the experiment to estimate the initial hody composition for the other animais. The remaining 24 animais were distrihuted in a completely randomized 2x2 factorial design, with four treatments (two roughages and two concentrates) and six replicates. The sheep were slaughtered when they reached 30,0 kg BW. Elephant grass diets provided higher intake and digestihility than sugarcane diets for the following contents: dry matter (DM); organic matter (OM); crude protein (CP); neutral detergent fiher, minerais, total carhohydrates (TC); and total digestihle nutrients (TDN). Among the concentrates, corn meai diets were associated with higher intakes than rice hran diets for the following contents: DM, OM, CP, TC, and TDN. Animais from ali of the treatments exhihited low average daily weight gain and low protein and high fat and energy hody leveis. Sugarcane and rice hran can he used as ingredients in diets for sheep with low weight gain potential. Regardless of roughage or concentrate types used in diets for confined UB sheep, performance and hody composition remained unaltered.