Feeding African Palm Oil and Gliricidia Sepium to Dairy Cattle in the Tropics

Extract

The advancement of ‘self reliance’ in developing counties is essential to their future success. This can be achieved by reducing their dependence on imported products, such as concentrate feeds made from imported materials. If this is to be accomplish alternative feed resources must be identified and developed. In topical environments oil producing plants and leguminous fodder trees are abundant and represent an existing feed resource which can be utilized. These feeds are capable of providing a sustainable alternative to imported feeds, as they are inherent to these environments and economic to produce.

The aim was to assess the possibility of the complete replacement of concentrate with African Palm Oil and Gliricidia sepium.

A total of sixty six cows were used in two experiments which were completed simultaneously on two separate farms. The cows were allocated to the experimental diets 20 days post-partum and the treatment groups were balanced for previous lactation yield, the number of previous parturitions, calving index and condition score.