Review on: Role of Legume Forage Meal Supplementation on Feed Intake, Weight Gain, Digestibility and Carcass Characteristics of Ruminant Livestock
This paper recapitulates the role of legume forage meal supplementation on feed intake, weight gain, and digestibility and carcass characteristics of ruminant livestock. The different research works that had been carried out on ruminant livestock that fed on a basal diet of roughage based diets and supplemented with leaf meal(hay) of forage legumes demonstrated that supplementation of legume forages stimulated microorganism function in the rumen, reduced retention time and thus increased the intake of the feeds. Furthermore, different research output demonstrated the advantages of forage legume supplementation in process of digestibility which had depicted that supplementation of legume forages such as Lablab purpureus, Cowpea, pigeon pea, alfalfa and Sesbania sesba, Tagasaste, L. pallida, Desmodium leaf meal (hay) had played significant role in improvements in digestibility of DM, OM, CP, NDF and ADF. Moreover, this review paper also had been demonstrated the positive effect of supplementation of legume forages leaf meals on weight gain and carcass characteristics in ruminant livestock as did concentrate supplements. Therefore, it is advisable to livestock producers to use legume forage leaf as protein supplements in order to improve the livestock production and boost the economic advantages. Despite the many research output on effect of supplementation on ruminant livestock, the availability of information to the livestock producers is very low. Future research be aimed to demonstrate many of research output on supplementation effect of legume forages wider scale in order to benefits the communities. This review paper also not reported supplementation effect of forage legumes on carcass quality characteristics such as carcass compositions and chilling losses which should be reviewed in the future in order to fill the gap.
