Introduction
The major constraint to livestock production in Nigeria is the scarcity of quality and sufficient supply of feed throughout the year. This is more so because of the competition between man and livestock for the available food grains. Added to this is the increasing population at a very high rate, especially in developing countries like Nigeria. With the increasing demand for livestock products in the world economy and shrinking land area, future hope of feeding the nations and safeguarding their food security will depend on their better utilization of the non-conventional feed resources which cannot be used as food for human (Makkar, 2000).
Agricultural wastes and by-products have been used extremely in ruminant nutrition in many parts of the world as substitute for concentrate feeds which are usually very expensive in the developing countries (Akinfemi, 2010a). In Nigeria, there is a wide gap between animal requirement and the available feedstuff. Although a huge tonnage of agriculture waste and by-products are produced annually in Nigeria, only a few fraction are used to feed ruminants while the largest proportion are burnt or discarded leading to environmental pollution and health hazards (Akinfemi, 2010a).
Ruminants are endowed with the ability to convert low quality feed into high quality protein and utilize feeds from land not suitable for cultivation of crop, but however, the utilization of these low quality crop residues are hampered by their low protein content, fibre digestibility, vitamins and minerals. These materials considered as waste could be recycled by environmental friendly methods into ruminant feed by physical, chemical and biological methods. The possibility of biological treatment of agricultural waste and by products has a great potential as an alternative to the use of expensive chemical methods (Abd-Allah, 2007).
The nutritive value of a ruminant feed is determined by the concentration of its chemical components, as well as extent of digestion. Determining the digestibility of feeds in vivo is laborious, expensive, requiring large amount of time and is largely unsuitable for single feedstuff thereby making it unsuitable for routine feed evaluation (Getachew et al., 2004). Consequently in vitro gas production techniques were developed to predict fermentation of ruminant feedstuff. It is a laboratory estimation of degraded feeds which are important in livestock nutrition (Ajayi and Babayemi, 2008). It is a method reproducible and parameters obtained correlate well with in vivo method (Ajayi and Babayemi, 2008). A feedstuff incubated with buffered rumen liquor and gas produced is measured as an indirect indicator of fermentation kinetics (Rymer et al., 2005). It is first degraded and the resulting fraction may either be fermented to produce gas, fermentation acids or incorporated into microbial biomass. When combined with measures of degradation, gas production techniques provides a measure of the proportion of feed that is fermented as opposed to that which is partitioned to microbial growth (Rymer et al., 2005). The principle of determining potential rumen degradability/fermentability of a feed by measuring gas produced from a batch culture was first developed by McBee (1953) and Hungate (1966).
1.1 Research Objectives
The study of the effect of biomodification with Trichoderma harzianum on the chemical composition and in vitro gas production characteristics of sole and supplemented melon seed husk has been designed with the following objectives.
- To determine the effects of biomodification with Trichoderma harzianum on the chemical composition of supplemented and unsupplemented melon seed husk
- To investigate the effects of biomodification with Trichoderma harzianum on the in vitro gas production characteristics of melon seed husk with or without supplements.
- To measure the short chain fatty acid (SCFA) production potential of biomodified melon seed husk with or without supplement.
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