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Sawdust as a Diluent for Adapting Cattle to Concentrate Diets

U.S. Department of Agriculture, Beltsville, Maryland 20705

Abstract

Four experiments were conducted with sawdust as a dietary diluent as cattle were adapted to an all-concentrate diet. In the first experiment 24 individually fed ruminally fistulated cattle (370 kg) were abruptly switched from a forage diet to concentrate diets containing 20, 35 or 50% sawdust for 5 or 10 days, and then the concentrate diet with no sawdust was fed for another 30 days. There were no differences in grain intake related to level of sawdust or to interval of sawdust feeding. Ruminal fluid pH dropped markedly during the first 2 experimental days for all treatments. In general, cattle fed the 20% sawdust diet had lower ruminal fluid pH than those fed the 50% sawdust diet during the sawdust feeding interval.

In experiments 2, 3 and 4, a total of 160 growing steers were group fed and abruptly switched from forage to the concentrate diet diluted with varying percentages of sawdust, fed for 5 or 10 days, and then fed only concentrate for another 10 to 30 days. The steers tended to go "off feed" when abruptly switched from forage to 20 or 35% sawdust diets, or from the 50% sawdust diet to the all-concentrate diet. There was less fluctuation in daily grain intake when dietary sawdust was reduced from 50% to 0% in three steps than when the sawdust was abruptly withdrawn. In general, control steers that were switched by decreasing the dietary percentage of forage while increasing the percentage of concentrate during a 10-day interval had fewer off-feed problems and tended to have higher weight gains for the total feeding period than sawdust fed cattle.

¹ Ruminant Nutrition Laboratory, Nutrition Institute, Agricultural Research Service, Beltsville, Maryland.

² The authors gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Mr. J. Grinsted and Mr. B. Phillips for care of experimental animals and of Mr. L. Colbert for laboratory analyses.