Chemical characteristics of physical pretreated oil palm frond

Oil palm frond has a great potential to be fully utilised as ingredients or supplements in animal feed. Physical pretreatment by pressing the OPF using conventional sugarcane pressing machine to obtain the pressed OPF fibre and OPF juice is considered to be a promising technique. Physical pretreatment is able to loosen up the lignocellulose structure in the OPF and thus release high amount of sugars, which further improve the degradability of OPF. This study aims to characterise the fresh OPF, pressed OPF fibre and OPF juice by determining their proximate composition, lignocellulose composition and also free sugar content in the OPF. The results shows contents of dry matter (DM), ash, crude protein (CP), ether extract (EE) and crude fibre (CF) of OPF juice (87.01% DM, 7.03% ash, 1.37% CP, 0.44% EE and 0.14% CF) from petiole are not statistically different with OPF juice from whole OPF (88.50% DM, 6.58% ash, 1.97% CP, 0.54% EE and 0.34% CF). The lignocellulose compositions between hemicellulose (HC) and also cellulose (CE) were significantly different between whole fresh OPF (21.06% HC; 31.27% CE), pressed OPF fibre (9.03% HC; 45.32% CE) and lyophilised OPF juice (0.72% HC; 0.33% CE). Lignin content was significantly highest in whole and petiole of fresh OPF (19% and 17.1%), followed by pressed OPF fibre
(13.38% and 10.42%) and least in OPF juice (1.31% and 0.23%). The improving of lignin degradation would increase the digestibility and feed intake of the ruminant. For
the free sugar composition in the OPF juice from the whole OPF was 60.5% glucose, 18.5% of fructose and 21% of sucrose. The OPF juice will provide important insight for the development animal feed as well as supplement and it can serve as component in silage making.