• Asian-Australasian Journal of Animal Sciences
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• v.3 no.2
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• pp.75-83
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• 1990

An experiment was conducted with three ruminally and intestinally cannulated non-lactating cows of Finnish Ayrshire breed, to assess the ruminal degradation characteristics of oat (Avena sativa), rye (Secale cereale) and rice (Oryza sativa) straw by the nylon bag technique, and the subsequent post-ruminal degradation of their rumen-undegraded residues by using the mobile bag technique, respectively. The straw samples were untreated or treated with aqueous $NH_3$ or with urea solution in cold or hot water. The untreated straw samples were milled or chopped, and the treated straw samples were chopped. The constant values a, b, and c were computed according to the exponential equation, where a = intercept of degradation curve at time 0, b = potentially degradable material, c = rate of degradation of band (a+b) = maximum potential degradability (asymptote). It was found that nitrogen contents of chemically treated straw were markedly increased by both $NH_3$ and urea treatments. Milling the samples attributed to a remarkable loss at 0 h incubation time as compared to chopping of the respective samples. However, chemical treatment markedly improved the b value and the subsequent (a+b) values for dry matter, organic matter, neutral-detergent fiber, and acid-detergent fiber of the samples. Furthermore, temperature of the water used in the urea solutions was considered essential, since urea in hot water rather than in cold water seemed to enhance the overall degradability. The disappearance of rumen-incubated straw residues from the mobile bags ranged from 4.5 to 9.6% for the parameters measured. On average, the OM disappearance from bags was clearly higher for the residues of urea treated straw compared to those of ammonia treated straw, but the disappearance of NDF tended, however, to be higher on the ammonia treatment.