The effect of feeding sago waste and coconut pith waste on growth performance and carcass characteristics of Katjang goats

Enhancing local goat production is important to replace imports and choice mutton could be made available at a lower cost if the animals are fattened with locally available feedstuffs. To produce meat locally, livestock breeders should enhance local livestock production and continuously sustain the supply annually. But the main problem limiting livestock production in Malaysia is animal feed. Thus, the objectives of this study is to investigate the effect of feeding agriculture wastes namely sago pith wastes (SPW) and coconut pith wastes (CPW) on the performance and carcass characteristics of local Katjang goats. Twenty (20) female Katjang goats of five (5) months of age and weighing between 18 - 22 kg were used in a study to assess the effects feeding SPW and CPW on feed intake and their growth performance over 120 days feeding period. The animals were randomly divided into five treatment groups, namely T1S10, T2C10, T3SC10, T4SC20 and T5Cn for Treatment 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 respectively, with four (4) animals per group. Treatment 5 (control group) was fed 500 g of formulated diet per day while Treatments 1, 2, 3 and 4 were fed similar amount of the diets but replaced with 10% SPW, 10% CPW, 10% SPW+10% CPW and 20% SPW + 20% CPW respectively. The diets for the respective treatments were iso-caloric and iso-nitrogenous with the ME and CP content of approximately 8.7 MJ/kg DM and 10.5% respectively. Total feed intake of the animals in Treatment 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 were 425, 421, 354, 367 and 434 g/day respectively. The final body weight was significantly higher (P<0.05) in Treatment 1 (25.5 kg) compared with 22.7, 20.0. 21.2 and 22.2 kg in Treatments 2, 3, 4 and 5 respectively. Treatment 3 and 4 were significantly (P<0.05) longer in body length (54.67 and 53.00 cm respectively) than the other treatment groups, while the control group had the shortest (P<0.05) chest girth (75.67cm) as compared to other treatment groups. There were a high and positive correlations between feed intake and body weight and all of the body measurements. The feed conversion ratio (FCR) for the respective groups were 10.6, 18.8, 58.0, 63.2 and 13.8. A second study on the carcass characteristics of the animals fed with SPW (Group T1S) revealed that their carcass weight were significantly (P<0.05) heavier (27.34 kg) compared to the control group (26.33 kg) (Group T2Cn). The dressing percentage of T1S showed significantly better yield (46.21% P<0.05) compared to T2Cn (40.34%). The neck, breast, shoulder and leg parts were significantly higher (P<0.05) in T1S compared with T2Cn. The weight of bone showed a significant different (P<0.05) between animals offered with SPW (T1S) and those without SPW (T2Cn). Thus SPW did increase dressing percentage, the meat to bone ratio and also the growth performance of the animals. It is concluded that both CPW and SPW can be used as the ingredient in the diets of Katjang goats. SPW in particular has potential to be used as an energy source in goat feed to increase dressing percentage of the carcass.