School of Agriculture, Food and Ecosystem Sciences - Theses

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End date: 1994 × Start date: 1993 × Type: Masters Research thesis × Subject: Effect of lupines on × Subject: Growth ×

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    Effect of lupins on the performance of young calves
    Chau, Chau Hoang ( 1994)
    This study was conducted to examine the performance of young calves early weaned off milk replacer and fed on starter concentrates containing 0% to 100% lupins. Thirty male Friesian calves aged up to one week old were involved in the experiment. Due to the outbreak of scours, 4 calves died prior to the actual start of measuring at week 4. The rest were allocated at random based on stratified liveweight to 4 treatment diets containing 0, 33, 67 and 100% steamed-flaked lupins fed ad libitum during 28 days of period 1 (preweaning) and 35 days of period 2 (post-weaning). Calves fed 100% lupins completely lost appetite and grew slowly after 6 weeks of receiving experimental diet although the reason for that was not fully elucidated. However, including lupins up to 67% in diets of young calves did not affect the health status, feed intakes, feed efficiency and growth rates (P>0.05). Calves fed diets containing 0, 33, and 67% lupins consumed about 2.5 kg DM/day and grew at approximately 1 kg/day with feed conversion ratios of approximately 2.5 kgDM/kg liveweight gain during the post-weaning period. Plasma and ruminal metabolic measurements were fairly uniform (P>0.05) for these calves indicating they had similar degrees of ruminal development and fermentation. Digestibility of DM, N and NDF decreased (P<0.05) with the increase in proportion of lupins in diets whereas that of ADF showed no significant (P>0.05) difference among treatment diets. The result indicated that steamed-flaked lupins can be satisfactorily included up to 67% in calf starter rations without adverse effect on calf performance. Including lupins at these levels helped cut the feed cost per unit gain weight by 10% compared with using 100% commercial calf pellets.