No abstract

This study was conducted to determine the chemical composition and estimating nutritive value of soybean meal, sunflower meal, rapeseed meal and cotton-seed meal using in vitro gas production technique. The experimental samples (200 mg DM from each) were incubated in vitro with rumen liquor taken from three canulated rams at 2, 4, 6, 8, 12, 24, 36, 48 and 72 h in three replicates. The results showed that there are significant differences between gas production values of samples at all incubation times (p<0.0001). Sunflower meal and soybean meal had the lowest and the highest gas production at 24 h incubation, respectively. There were significant differences in metabolizable energy (ME), net energy for lactation (NEL), organic matter digestibility (OMD) and short chain fatty acid (SCFA) of samples (p<0.0001). The sunflower meal has the lowest and soybean meal has the highest ME, NEL, OMD and SCFA compared with those of the others (8.69 MJ/kg DM, 5.48 MJ/kg DM, 55.14%, 0.60 mmol for sunflower meal and 12.98 MJ/kg DM, 9.03 MJ/kg DM, 85.03%, 1.13 mmol for soybean meal). In conclusion, it can be said that comparative nutritive value of Iranian oil seed meals which are tested in current study as below: soybean meal> rapeseed meal> cotton-seed meal> sunflower seed meal.