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Kinetics of Cell Wall Digestion and Passage in Ruminants

2013; Linguagem: Inglês

10.2134/1993.foragecellwall.c21

2691-2341

D.R. Mertens,

Effects of Environmental Stressors on Livestock

Plant cell walls provide a large and renewable source of biomass for generating productive energy. Ruminants occupy a unique niche in our ecosystem in which they consume and use forage cell walls and effectively convert them into meat, milk, hides, and wool for human use. The digestive system of ruminants is well suited to a herbivorous diet. The estimation of the indigestible fraction is critical to the accurate description of digestion kinetics. There are three basic sources of error in measuring digestion kinetics: inaccurate data, improper mathematical models, and inappropriate fitting of the data to the models. Similar to the situation of digestion kinetics, attempts to describe passage kinetics were based on excretion curves of marked feed particles. Simulations of the various integrated models of digestion and passage offer insight as to the sensitivity of intake and digestibility by ruminants to changes in intrinsic and extrinsic factors affecting cell wall digestion.