Digging deeper into forage digestion efficiency
- Project No: FDE.07.20
- Lead Researcher(s): Gabriel Ribeiro (University of Saskatchewan); Robert Gruninger (Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, Lethbridge)
- Collaborators: Wade Abbot (Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, Lethbridge); Greg Penner, Arun Kommadath, Rodrigo Orgtega-Polo (Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada)
- Year Started: 2021
Background
Improving feed efficiency helps to reduce feed costs and reduce the environmental footprint of beef cattle production. While residual feed intake (RFI) has been used extensively in research situations to determine individual animal feed efficiency, there are often differences in RFI values in the same animals fed different diets or at different stages in their life cycle. Previous work demonstrated a large degree of variability (42-61%) in neutral detergent fibre (NDF) digestibility in cattle fed the same barley straw-based diet, leading to a need to identify the animal and microbial factors that drive individual animal variability in fibre digestion.
Objective
The objectives of this study are to:
- Determine differences in the microbial ecology of the rumen and/or hindgut between animals that differ in forage digestion efficiency
- Discover whether there are key genes and or microbes influencing forage digestion efficiency
- Investigate the role of animal physiology and host metabolism in forage digestion efficiency compared to the microbial processes
- Explore how forage digestion efficiency rankings may change due to changes to feed composition and how this relates to animal physiological and rumen microbiological parameters
Implications of the research
Understanding the mechanisms that cause some animals to digest forages more efficiently than others may help to develop tools to select animals that are more efficient on pasture or other high-forage diets, and lower production costs.
This project is also funded by the Beef Cattle Research Council, Saskatchewan Cattlemen’s Association, and NSERC