Growth Performance and Plasma Metabolites of Grazing Beef Cattle Backgrounded on Buffel or Buffel- Mixed Pastures.

Animals (Basel)

Animal Genetics and Nutrition, Veterinary Sciences Discipline, College of Public Health, Medical and Veterinary Sciences, Division of Tropical Health and Medicine, James Cook University, Townsville, QLD 4811, Australia.

Published: August 2021

Dietary crude protein and dry matter digestibility are among the major factors limiting feed intake and weight gain of cattle grazing native and improved pastures in the subtropics of Northern Australia during the dry season. Incorporating a suitable legume into grasses improves pasture quality and cattle weight gain, but only a limited number of legume pastures can establish and persist in cracking clay soils. This study aimed to evaluate the effect of inclusion in buffel grass () pastures on the plasma metabolite profile and growth performance of grazing beef cattle during the dry season. We hypothesised that backgrounding steers on buffel grass- mixed pastures would elicit significant changes in plasma glucose, bilirubin, creatinine, non-esterified fatty acids and β-hydroxybutyrate, resulting in higher liveweight gains than in steers on buffel grass only pastures. Four hundred tropical composite steers were assigned to buffel grass only ( = 200) or buffel grass oversown with (11.5% initial sward dry matter) pastures ( = 200) and grazed for 147 days during the dry season. accounted for 6.2% sward dry matter at the end of grazing period. Plasma metabolites results showed that changes in β-hydroxybutyrate, creatinine, bilirubin, glucose and non-esterified fatty acids were within the expected normal range for all the steers, indicating that with or without inclusion in the diet of grazing steers, animal health status was not compromised. It was also evident that inclusion in buffel grass pastures had no impact on the plasma metabolite profile, liveweight and daily weight gain of grazing steers. Therefore, our tested hypothesis of higher changes in plasma metabolite profile and higher liveweight gains due to backgrounding on low-level buffel grass- mixed pastures does not hold.

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Source
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8388787PMC
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/ani11082355DOI Listing

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