Feed for the goats – Part 2
Sometime ago, I wrote about our predicament of not having sufficient land for the growing of Napier Grass or Rumput Gajah for our goats. I then mentioned that we were preparing alternative feeds that would not require much land. Our choices were petai belalang and pokok turi trees.
As part of the Kursus Ternakan Kambing that I recently attended, a doctor from MARDI who had also served with the Jabatan Haiwan, gave a lecture on goat feed. Amongst the important points he made was:
a) The FCR (food conversion ratio) for goats was 30:1. Hence a goat has to eat or be fed 30 kgs of feed for it to have a weight gain of 1 kg,
b) The optimal feed requirement for goats should be:
Protein - Min 12% ( 38%)
Energy for Metabolism - Min 10.6 MJ / kg (7.6 MJ/kg)
Calcium - Min 0.65% (0.69%)
Phosphorus - Min 0.45% (0.5%)
Salt - between 0.50 - 1.0%
Vitamins A & D - Min 2200 dan 300 i.u/kg
Fiber - Min 15.0%
Air - As required
The doctor also gave us a lengthy table of the food contents of several common feed that Malaysian farmers could be expected to use. Unfortunately pokok turi was excluded from this list.
Note :
The bracketed figures are those for pokok turi.
We were most fortunate that one of the Jabatan Haiwan representatives was kind enough to do some research on the food content of pokok turi leaves. He emailed me the analysis earlier this week.
c) In the event of imbalances of feed content, for example, petai belalang has a 40% protein content, we should work out the mathematical combination of the weight of the various types so as to obtain a ratio as close as possible to the ideal content.
It is clear that there would be an imbalance if we just fed the goats with
pokok turi leaves. I have to make an appointment with the doctor from
MARDI and seek his help in working out a combination of the feed with
turi as the backbone.
The owner of another blog, The Kebun’s Weblog, left a very helpful comment on my post on the turi leaves. I do agree with him that the turi leaves are
generally sparse and we need quite a lot of them to feed one goat well.
Still the advantages of the pokok turi are very alluring:
a) it grows quite fast (about 8 months or so to mature),
b) it does not have to be replanted everytime we prune the leaves to be fed to the goats,
c) it occupies little land and can be grown in quite a dense manner.
Though we have about 400 turi trees already planted, they are still young and quite a while away before we can use them for fodder. We are going to plant even more, maybe to bring it to 2,000 trees. After all I can give away the surplus trees, but a position of insufficiency would set us back another 8 months.
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[...] have written about our attempts here and again in Part 2 to seek natural feed for our goats. One alternative we are looking at is to [...]
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