NUTRITIVE VALUE OF LOCAL GRASS AND LEGUMES

บทคัดย่อ

Local grass (Brachiaria mutica) and legumes (Leucaena leucocephala, Sesbania grandioflora and Mimosa pigra L.) were liberally fed to sheep in a balance trial so as to detect the voluntary intake, apparent digestibility, nitrogen balance and other nutritive values.

The results of this experiment showed that there were no statistical significant differences in voluntary feed intake. On the contary dry matter and organic matter digestibility of Sesbania and Para grass were higher (p <0.05) than the others. The average dry matter digestibility of Leucaena, Sesbania, Mimosa and Para grass were 54.5, 67.0,53,2 and 63.3 percent while the average organic matter digestibility were 55.7, 68.8, 55.3 and 66.3 percent, respectively.

It was, however, concluded from the nutritive values investigated from the experiment that all of these local grass and legume trees could be used as ruminant feeds but Sesbania seemed to have the highest palatability. Therefore, further experiments should be conducted in order to get more information from these feeds.