The association between mean daily weight gain, Theileria parva infections, clinical East Coast fever and other possible determinants of weight gain were examined in a longitudinal observational study that was conducted in cohorts of female calves from five agro-ecological zone (AEZ)-grazing strata. The strata were upper-midlands (UM) 1 zero-grazing, UM 1 open-grazing, UM 2 zero-grazing, UM 4 zero-grazing and UM 4 open-grazing. In total, 225 calves on 188 smallholder dairy farms were visited within the first 2 weeks of life and thereafter at biweekly intervals up to the age of 6 months between March 1995 and August 1996. During each visit, the calves were weighed and other calf-management practices in the farm during the visit such as housing, feeding and tick control also were recorded. Other events such as morbidity and mortality between or during the visits were also recorded.
The overall mean daily weight gains were 0.24–0.29 kg (S.D.=0.17–0.22 kg) and were lower than the recommended targets for smallholder farms of 0.40–0.50 kg. The major tendency in variability of daily weight gains was due to visit-to-visit variation (especially in calves >3 months old).
Differences in mean daily gains were associated with AEZ-grazing strata and calf-level factors that included breed of calf, calf sickness, incidence of ECF, feeding of milk, concentrate feeds and minerals and interaction between calf age and AEZ-grazing strata (P<0.05). ECF and other calf sicknesses exerted a temporal effect on calf-growth at the height of illness and immediately after; calves later recovered the lost growth except where other factors such as poor calf nutrition prevailed. Improvement in calf-growth in Murang’a District is achievable and extension services should continue to target individual-calf-level management practices. 相似文献
The objective of this study was to assess the quality of commercial poultry feeds in Benin. The performances of 396 unsexed
broilers chickens Ross 308 fed with a control diet (R1) and five commercial diets (R2 to R6) were evaluated. Broilers fed
commercial diets showed significantly low (P < 0.001) body weight gain (BWG) and economic feed efficiency (EFE) and significantly
high (P < 0.001) mortality rate, feed conversion ratio and feed cost (FC). At 42 days of age, the body weight of broilers
fed control diet was 1662 g versus 838 to 1041 g for broilers fed commercial diets. In R1 diet, overall FC was 388 Fcfa/kg
BWG, and EFE was 2.7 Fcfa BWG/Fcfa feed. These values represented respectively 50 to 64% and 1.6 to 2.0 times the FC and the
EFE recorded in commercial diets. A deficiency in crude protein and metabolisable energy, combined with high contents of crude
fibre and total ash was found in some commercial diets. These results suggest the necessity to organize the market of poultry
feed in Benin in the perspective to reduce the production cost by using more efficient and cheap commercial diets. 相似文献