Chemical composition, digestibility, and voluntary feed intake of mango residues by sheep

The chemical composition, digestibility, and voluntary feed intake by sheep of mango by-products were studied in an experiment with five dietary treatments consisting of mango peels and seed kernels, offered individually or together with urea block and a control. The mango residues were offered with rice straw and the control diet was straw only. Five groups of five male sheep of Djallonké type, 12-18 months old and weighing on average 18.6 kg were allocated randomly to the diets to assess the voluntary feed intake. Apparent digestibility of the same diets was measured using four sheep per diet. The mango residues were low in crude protein, 67 and 70 g/kg dry matter for the peels and the seed kernels, respectively. The content of neutral detergent fiber varied from 306 to 388 g/kg dry matter (DM) for the kernel and the peels, respectively. The kernel had relatively high level of fat (105 g/kg DM) and tannins (29 and 40 g/kg DM of hydrolysable and total tannins, respectively). The highest intake was observed with the diet containing both residues and urea block (741 g/day). The intake of kernels was lower in all diets when offered with the peels than when offered with rice straw alone. Apparent digestibility of the diets containing mango residues was 0.60-0.65. The peels and kernels had high digestibility coefficients (0.74 and 0.70, respectively). Based on the results above, it can be concluded that it would be interesting to test the residues in a growth experiment.