nutrient degradability and performance by the west african dwarf goats fed rumen epithelium-based diets

nutritive value of rumen epithelial scraping (rep) was assessed using in sacco and in vivo procedures. concentrates were so formulated that 0% (a), 35% (b), 70% (c), and 100% (d) of soybean meal (sbm), were replaced (weight for weight) with rep. in a completely randomized design, 16 west african dwarf (wad) goats were randomly allocated to the experimental diets to assess feed intake and digestibility. in a second trial, the concentrates, sbm and the rep were degraded in the rumen of fistulated goats to determine dry matter (dm) and crude protein (cp) degradability. no significant difference (p< 0.05) was observed in dm and cp consumption of goats on the various dietary treatments. the variation observed for digestible dm and cp among diets were significant (p< 0.05). the highest value of digestibility coefficients of dm and cp were observed in diet b (77.72% and 79.2% respectively). there were significant differences observed (p< 0.05) in the dm and cp degradation characteristics of the different samples incubated in the rumen of goats. rumen epithelial waste contained more soluble fractions (30.13% dm and 71.04% cp) than soybean meal (29.82% dm and 18.6% cp), and it was shown that increasing rep in the concentrate increases the soluble dm and cp (p< 0.05). the results indicated that rep is nutritive and can replace sbm at reasonable levels in goat production enterprise.