Sources of Carbohydrates for Growing Rabbits

Sen Sorphea

Center for Livestock and Agriculture Development (CelAgrid)
Kandal province, Cambodia
sorphea@yahoo.com

Introduction

Livestock are very important for supporting human life. Due to bird flue, some people prefer eating the meat from rabbits. Water spinach is easy to plant and has a very high yield of biomass, which is rich in protein for rabbit. Therefore, the price of rabbit meat increases remarkably in the market. Thus rabbit production is increasing, but there are problems because of cost of commercial feed. In Europe some rabbit farms are closed because the profit and expense has no balance, farmers spend more money on the very expensive commercial feed, because they forgot to think about the local plant that they use everyday as the feed for both human and animals. In addition, local feed resources are very important because they can contain a lot of protein source. Using local feed for animals is the best way because it is easy to find and spend less money. Food such as banana, sugar cane stalk, sweet potato and water spinach have potential as feed for rabbits.

Water spinach is a vegetable for human and animal that contains a very high level of protein (Kean Sophea and Preston 2001). It is easy to plant and has a short growth period. It can be harvested in dry or flood period.

Sweet potato roots have very high dry matter yield (Moat and Dryden 1993; Rashid et al 2000). In 100g of sweet potato root there are 20 g of carbohydrates and 4.2 g of sugar. (USDA Nutrient database, 2006)

Banana contains 5.3 % of crude protein. Surplus and discarded bananas are a potential feed resource of great quantitative and qualitative interest in animal production (Le Dividich et al 1976).

Hypothesis

Sweet potato root will support higher feed intake and live weight gain than banana fruit or sugar cane stalk when used as a supplement in a basal diet of water spinach.

Objective

• To evaluate the various source of carbohydrate in feed on growth performance of rabbits.

Materials and Methods

Location

A total of 16 rabbit cages will be prepared at Kampong Cham National School of
Agriculture. This experiment will be carried out from 11 August to 11 October, 2008.

Experimental Design

The experimental design is a CRBD with four treatments and 4 replicates per treatment. Water spinach will be used as a basal diet. The treatments are as follows (Photos 1 to 4):

• WS:                 Water Spinach

• WSSU:            Water Spinach + Sugar Cane Stalk

• WSSP:             Water Spinach + Sweet Potato root

• WSBA:           Water Spinach + Banana

Experimental animal

16 young rabbits with average body weight 730 g will be confined in individual cages constructed by wood and bamboo.

Feeding and Management

Water spinach will be purchased from water spinach plantation growth from water waste and hang with wire before feeding. The stalk of sugar cane will be split longitudinally into two pieces (length 15cm). Banana fruit will be cut into two pieces. Sweet potato root will be purchased from the market and cleaned before chopping into pieces. The feed will be offered three times every day, at 7:00 AM, and at 4:30 PM. Water will not be provided as there is sufficient in the water spinach.

Animal housing

The cages are made from wood and bamboo with length of 0.5 m, width of 0.5 m and height of 0.9 m (Photo 5).

Measurements

Feed offered and feed residues will be weighted and recorded daily. The rabbits will be weighed every 5 days. Water spinach will be separated into leaf and stem to calculate the proportions and analyzed for DM by microwave radiation (Undersander et al 1993), N (AOAC 1990) and water extractable DM and N (Ly and Preston 1997).  

Statistical analysis

The data will be subjected to analysis of variance using the General Linear Model (GLM) option of the MINITAB software (Release 13.31, 2000). Sources of variation are: feeds, blocks and error.

Reference

AOAC 1990 Official Methods of Analysis. Association of Official Analytical Chemists. 15th edition (K Helrick, editor). Arlington pp 1230

Kean Sophea and T R Preston, 2001. Comparison of biodigester effluent and urea as fertilizer for water spinach vegetable. Livestock Research for Rural Development, Volume 13, Number 6, December 2001. http://www.cipav.org.co/lrrd/lrrd13/6/kean136.htm

Le Dividich J Sève and Geoffroy F 1976 Préparation et utilisation de l'ensilage de banana en alimentation animale. I. Technologie, composition chimique et bilan des matières nutritives. Annls Zootech., 25. (In press)

Ly J and Preston T R 1997 An approach to the estimation of washing losses in leaves of tropical trees. Livestock Research for Rural Development (9)3: http://cipav.org.co.lrrd/lrrd13/1/ly131.htm

USDA Nutrient database, 2006. Sweet potato from Wíkipedia. ©2006 by Wíkipedia

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