The potential of ramie as forage for ruminants: impacts on growth, digestion, ruminal fermentation, carcass characteristics and meat quality of goats

摘要

Take home message Ramie by-products are a potential use of ramie as forage for ruminants. The current experiment showed that ramie hay or raw ramie was a better way to use ramie by-products, which benefit to improve growth performance, rumen fermentation, nutrient digestibility and meat quality of goats.Ramie has been used as a textile raw material for long time in China, where 200 million tons more ramie by-products are produced annually. Ramie residues become much more interesting, combined with the high yields of ramie in fresh biomass (Kipriotis etal., 2015; Dinh et al., 2007). However, less information is available documenting the effect of ramie on goat performance and to evaluate it's the potential as ruminant forage. The objective of this study was to investigate the influence of ramie inclusion in feedlot diets provided as hay or silage on growth performance, digestion, ruminal fermentation, and meat quality of goats.