Plant sources of animal feed
The various categories of plant parts/ residues / by products used for feeding animals are given below:
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Straw:/font> Means the dried reminant of a crop from which the seed has been threshed. The term is most commonly used to wheat, oats, barely, rice etc.
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Leguminous pulse straws: Leguminous crops having fibrous residues are black gram, green gram, cowpea, groundnut etc. These residues are composed of husk of the pods with leaves and tender stems which are more nutritious than the cereal straw and stovers. They are very good feed for sheep and goats. Leguminous crop residues are highly nutritious and palatable.
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Husks (Hulls): Husks are available in bulk in the milling industry like rice milling, solvent extraction plants for groundnut oil and corn oil, groundnut husks, maize husks etc. They are of low density and are unpalatable. Some times they create a disposal problem because of being available in large quantities at the milling site.
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Hay: It consists of the entire herbage of comparatively fine stemmed grasses or other forage plants. Hay is any forage crop cut before it is ripe and dried for storage. More nutritious and palatable than straw, because the entire crop is cut before maturity and dried.
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Silage: It is the product formed when any green plant material is put where it can ferment in the absence of air. In this process of fermentation the silage develops acids. These acids preserve nutrient substances in the plant material.
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Stovers: Stovers are the byproducts after harvesting the grains (maize, jowar, millets etc). They are given to the livestock with various supplements. Stovers are much better roughages than cereal straws.
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Haulms: Plant material above the ground level harvested, dried and used for feeding livestock eg. Groundnut plants.
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Bhusa: The refuse collected from threshing pulse crop like red gram, bengal gram etc. is commonly known as Bhusa. It consists of leaves, immature pods and seeds and other empty shells of pods and is available as an inexpensive byproduct which is quite useful for feeding cattle. It is also fairly nutritious.
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Grasses: All grasses belonging to the family of plants, gramineae comprising 450 genera and more than 6000 species distributed throughout the world. Grasses include all the cultivated cereal feed crops. Grasses considerably vary in their habbits, size and habitat. Some grasses are annuals, while others are perennials. When plants dries up after flowering and seeding in the course of a single season, it is termed as annual, but when new shoots and older ones ending in inflorescence and found mixed in the same plant, it is termed perennial.
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Last modified: Friday, 15 July 2011, 7:20 AM