Abstract
An experiment was conducted to study the nutritional quality of whole crop corn silage ensiled with cage layer manure in sheep. Treatments were designed as a $3{\times}3$ Latin square with 16-day periods. Sheep were allotted in one of three diet-treatments, which were whole crop corn silage (CS), whole crop corn+30% cage layer manure (CLM) silage (based on DM; MS) and rice straw+concentrate (SC) mixed at 8:2 ratio (on DM basis). Silage ensiled with CLM significantly increased (p<0.05) digestibilities of crude protein, NDF and ADF, TDN over the other treatments. Ruminal pH in sheep fed SC was significantly (p<0.05) higher than that of the other diets at 0.5, 1, 2, 4 and 8 h after feeding. Ruminal ammonia nitrogen concentration of the MS treatment was significantly (p<0.05) higher than that of the other treatments at 0, 1, 2 h after feeding. The MS treatment highly increased (p<0.05) feed intake, digestibility of organic matter and crude protein, nitrogen intake and retained nitrogen. The MS treatment highly increased (p<0.05) purine derivative (PD) excretion leading to higher microbial protein synthesis.