Estimation of the total efficiency of metabolizable energy utilization for maintenance and growth by cattle in tropical conditions

• Autor(a) principal: Henrique,Douglas Sampaio
• Data de Publicação: 2005
• Outros Autores: Vieira,Ricardo Augusto Mendonça, Malafaia,Pedro Antônio Muniz, Mancini,Maurício Cordeiro, Gonçalves,André Luigi
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Revista Brasileira de Zootecnia (Online)
• Texto Completo: http://old.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1516-35982005000300034
• topic: bioenergetics; growth; net energy; ruminants

Data of 320 animals were obtained from eight comparative slaughter studies performed under tropical conditions and used to estimate the total efficiency of utilization of the metabolizable energy intake (MEI), which varied from 77 to 419 kcal kg-0.75d-1. The provided data also contained direct measures of the recovered energy (RE), which allowed calculating the heat production (HE) by difference. The RE was regressed on MEI and deviations from linearity were evaluated by using the F-test. The respective estimates of the fasting heat production and the intercept and the slope that composes the relationship between RE and MEI were 73 kcal kg-0.75d-1, 42 kcal kg-0.75d-1 and 0.37. Hence, the total efficiency was estimated by dividing the net energy for maintenance and growth by the metabolizable energy intake. The estimated total efficiency of the ME utilization and analogous estimates based on the beef cattle NRC model were employed in an additional study to evaluate their predictive powers in terms of the mean square deviations for both temperate and tropical conditions. The two approaches presented similar predictive powers but the proposed one had a 22% lower mean squared deviation even with its more simplified structure.