Carcass traits for growing Barki lambs fed lime treated agro-industrial by-products

Abstract EN

Date seeds (TDS) and olive pulp (TOP) treated with lime solution were incorporated as untraditional rations to study their effect on growth performance and carcass traits of Barki sheep.

Thirty Barki male lambs (five months old and 27.98± 1.97 kg average body weight) were assigned to three equal groups.

The first group (control C) was fed on 30% clover hay + 70% concentrate feed mixture, concentrate feed mixture (CFM).

The second group was fed 30% clover hay + 50% CFM + 10% TDS + 10% TOP (T1), the third group was fed 30% clover hay + 30% CFM+ 20% TDS + 20% TOP (T2).

The actual voluntary feed intake, body weight changes and daily gain, the efficiency of feed conversion into live weight, carcass weight and economic evaluation were calculated.

Results revealed that, lambs fed control ration had the highest total dry matter intake (DMI) (1384 g/h/d) compared with T1 and T2 (1315 and 1199 g/h/day, respectively).

Average daily gain decreased with increasing treated date seed and olive pulp substituting the CFM.

The best feed conversion was recorded for the control group followed by T1 and T2 groups.

However, T1 was the least in feed cost of one kg gain, producing the highest economical efficiency.

Control group revealed the highest (P<0.05) values for dressing percentage (%) based on either fasting body weight (FBW) or empty body weight (EBW) (44.53 and 52.54, respectively), followed by T1 group (42.70 and 49.24, respectively) and then T2 group ( 41.76 and 46.95, respectively).