Vet World   Vol.18   April-2025  Article - 22 

Evaluating pellet and mash rumen protected soybean groat on nutrient digestibility, animal performance, carcass characteristics, and meat quality of fat-tailed sheep

Background and Aim: Optimizing feed strategies is critical in livestock production to enhance animal performance, nutrient utilization, and meat quality. Feed form, such as pelleted, mash, or blended forms, significantly influences these parameters. Investigating the optimal feed form for fat-tailed sheep production can improve economic outcomes and meat quality. This study aimed to evaluate the impact of dietary feed forms – pelleted (P10), mash (M10), and a blended form consisting of 50% pellet and 50% mash (M5P5) – on nutrient digestibility, animal performance, carcass characteristics, and meat quality attributes in fat-tailed sheep.

Materials and Methods: Fifteen fat-tailed lambs were randomly allocated to three experimental groups receiving either100% mash feed (M10), a 50:50 mixture of mash and pelleted feed (M5P5), or 100% pelleted feed (P10) for a 90-day feedingtrial. Feed intake parameters (dry matter, organic matter, crude protein, crude fat, crude fiber, and nitrogen-free extract)were recorded. Nutrient digestibility was assessed, and production performance measures, including body weight gain,average daily gain (ADG), feed efficiency ratio (FER), and feeding cost per gain were determined. Post-slaughter carcasstraits, proximate meat composition, cholesterol content, pH, water-holding capacity (WHC), cooking loss, and shear forcevalues were evaluated.

Results: Dietary feed forms had no significant impact (p > 0.05) on feed intake, nutrient digestibility, ADG, or FER.However, significant differences (p < 0.05) emerged in carcass traits, notably with increased hot carcass weights observedin M5P5 (19.57 kg) and P10 (19.40 kg) compared to M10 (17.10 kg). Feed form significantly influenced meat-to-boneratio, with M5P5 and P10 groups exhibiting superior ratios relative to the mash-fed group. Meat quality analysis indicatedsignificant variations (p < 0.05) in WHC and cooking loss; the M5P5 group demonstrated enhanced WHC (63.2%) andreduced cooking loss (18.4%) compared to other treatments. Proximate composition, cholesterol content, pH, and shearforce were unaffected by feed form (p > 0.05).

Conclusion: The blended mash-pellet diet (M5P5) effectively enhanced specific meat quality parameters, notably WHC and cooking loss, without compromising growth performance or nutrient utilization efficiency. These findings indicate potential for the strategic use of blended feeds in fat-tailed sheep production to optimize meat quality attributes, although further studies examining long-term economic and metabolic impacts are recommended.

Keywords: carcass characteristics, fat-tailed sheep, feed form, meat quality, nutrient digestibility.

How to cite this article: Riyanto J, Pramono A, Widyawati SD, Sudibya S, Cahyadi M, Yuliana WN, Apriyanto AA, Putri GRJ, and Barido FH (2025) Evaluating pellet and mash rumen protected soybean groat on nutrient digestibility, animal performance, carcass characteristics, and meat quality of fat-tailed sheep, Veterinary World, 18(4): 976-985.

Received: 06-01-2025   Accepted: 18-03-2025   Published online: 25-04-2025

Corresponding author: Joko Riyanto    E-mail: jokoriyanto@staff.uns.ac.id

DOI: 10.14202/vetworld.2025.976-985

Copyright: Riyanto, et al. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http:// creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.