Characterisation of potential oil palm frond (opf) juice as ruminant feed

The primary objectives of this study were to determine and to compare the nutritional contents of freeze-dried OPF juice from whole OPF and petiole(OPF).Beside that, this study was conducted to investigate the lignocellulosic contents of freeze-dried OPF juice from whole OPF and petiole (OPF). Best of knowledge this was the first paper that displayed the nutritional content of
whole OPF juice and OPF petiole that require for ruminant maintenance.Apart from that, this paper also described cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin content in whole OPF juice and OPF petiole juice. Both whole OPF and OPF petiole juices undergo freeze dried process to transform them from liquid to solid matter for easy to analyse.The freeze dried juices from whole OPF and OPF petiole were sampled for proximate analysis in order to find the gross
energy (GE), crude fibre (CF), crude protein (CP), ether extract (EE), ash, and nitrogen free extract (NFE) content.Lastly,the samples were analysed using detergent fibre analysis to get values of Acid Detergent Fibre (ADF), Neutral Detergent Fibre (NDF) and Acid Detergent Lignin (ADL) to determine the lignocellulose content.The data from proximate analysis were analysed using students t-test using lBM software package for statistical analysis (SPSS) version 22 to find the significant different of nutritional content between whole OPF and OPF juices in three different oil palm trees. The result of the study showed that only CP and CF were significantly different. The proximate analysis results show that the whole OPF juice contained 3305 1 83.60 cal/g GE, 0.51 ± 0.39% CF, 1.4826 ± O.6340% CP, 0.2216 ± 0.1215% EE, 6.57 ± 2.36% Ash, and 91.2180 ± 3.1314% NFE. The OPF petiole contained 3182 ± 75.69 cal/g GE, 0.14 ± 0.13% CF, 1.4074 ± O.1663% CP, 0.1594 ± 0.1014%EE, 6.41 ± 2.21% Ash, and 91.8865 ± 2.3379% NFE. The comparison of
whole OPF and OPF petiole juices showed that whole OPF juice has higher nutritional content than OPF petiole juice. However, both feeds cannot be served solely as ruminant feed due to low nutritive value. Moreover, whole
OPF and OPF petiole juices contain high level of lignin percentage than hemicellulose and cellulose. It is recommended that these OPF juices needs to improve by further pre-treatment to degraded lignin for suitable rumen digestion and could replace molasses in silage making.