The Apparent Digestibility of Nutrients and Energy Values of Some Oilseed Meals and Three Commonly Used Cereal Grains Fed to Pigs

Abstract

The need to balance the content of major nutrients in diets relative to their energy con-centration requires a knowledge of the available energy in the feed ingredients used. Unfortunately, there is a complete lack of published information on the energy values of most feeds available in many areas of the tropics. Most feed formulators have frequently used values reported elsewhere, particularly those published by the National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council (NAS/NRC), 1969. Some of these values have been mathematically derived from TDN, while in many cases the list may be incomplete with regards to certain feeds available exclusively in many areas of the tropics. The present studies were conducted to determine the digestibility of nutrients, digestible energy (DE), metabolizable energy (ME) and metabolizable energy adjusted to nitrogen equilibrium (ME) for eight locally available oilseed meals and three commonly used cereal grains in Nigeria.