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Matching Livestock Systems with Available Resources |
MEKARN Regional Conference 2007 |
Most of the soil in the costal area of Thua Thien Hue is sandy. Farmers here are often growing taro (Alocacia odora) in their gardens or fields and use leaves and tubers for the pigs and roots for people. The benefit of growing taro and using the leaves for replacement of conventional protein sources (soybean meal) was studies with Mong Cai (MC) sows. 104 households were selected for evaluation of benefit for growing taro.
Even with low fertilizer status of sandy soil in Vinh Phu commune, the farmers can get very high benefit of about five million VND per sao (500 m2), which is five times higher compared with rice production.
Eighteen MC sows (>third parity) were selected and mated by AI with the same semen of Yorkshire boar and allocated at random to three diets (T0: 100% soybean meal for supplement protein; T50: taro leaves replacing 50% of soybean protein; T100: 100% replacement of soybean by taro leaves. The fresh leaves were cooked with the remainder of the diet (rice bran and cassava root meal) prior to feeding them.
There were no differences in litter size at birth and at weaning among the treatments. Birth weight and weaning weight was higher in treatment T0 and T50 than in T100 (P<0.05). Total weaning weight/ litter did not differ among treatments. Percentage LW loss of the sows during lactation was lowest in treatment T0, then T50 and highest in treatment T100. FCR to produce 1 kg of weaning piglets did not differ among treatments. The economic benefit was highest in treatment T100 then T50 and lowest in treatment T0 (P<0.05).
It is concluded that optimum biological result is best with taro leaves replacing 50% of the soybean meal but economic benefit is highest for complete replacement of soybean by taro leaves.