Comparison of buffalo rumen liquor and buffalo faeces as inoculum for the in vitro gas production technique

Abstract

The in vitro gas production technique (IVGPT, Theodorou et al., 1994) requires a rumen liquor (RL) inoculum, as the other methods utilising a microbial fermentation approach to feedstuff evaluation. However, the RL is collected either from animals fitted with rumen cannula or at slaughtering. This raises a number of practical, economical and ethical problems, thus several studies have been carried out to test alternative inocula. To this aim faeces (FA) have been demonstrated to have high potentiality for the Tilley and Terry (1963) technique (El Saher et al., 1987; Akther et al., 1999; Cone et al., 2002). Mauricio et al. (2001), evaluating the forages fermentative characteristics by IVGPT, found lower potential gas production and longer lag times for bovine FA compared to RL as inoculum. Aim of present paper was to compare buffalo RL and FA as inoculum for IVGPT.

Keywords

• gas production, faeces vs. rumen liquor, fermentation kinetics