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Dairy farming in Thailand started with the establishment of the
Thai Danish Farm and Training Centre (TDDF) at Muak Lek, in 1962.
In 1971, the Thai Government took over responsibility and the
project was organised under the management of the newly established
government enterprise,under the name of "The Dairy Farming
Promotion Organisation of Thailand (DPO)". However, Thai farmers
still can not produce enough raw milk to meet the demand of the
whole country.
The Government's plan for the development of dairying
is aimed at a reduction of foreign exchange for the purchase of
imported dairy products but also to provide the farmers with the
opportunity to earn increased and more regular incomes and to
generate employment opportunities in farming, milk processing and
manufacturing industries.
One constraint on the raw milk production is the high cost of
inputs required in the production, in particular concentrate feed.
Feeding of dairy cattle in the tropics is often difficult because
of deficiencies in feed supply, in both quantity and quality
(Wanapat and Devendra, 1992; Leng,1999 ). The use of rice straw as
a feed in the dry season, in spite of its low nutritive value, has
been a common feeding system, generally practiced by dairy farmers
in the tropics when green forages are often scarced(Leng and
Preston, 1983; Wanapat, 1994,).
Feed resources and crop-residues are enormously avaiable locally
for use to increase livestock production in Thailand (Wanapat,
1999) such as cottonseed meal, dried brewery's grains, cassava
hay, leucaena leaf meal, cassava chip, broken rice, etc. While rice
straw or urea-treated straw are excellent roughage for dairy during
the long dry season. Studies carried out by Sarawish et al. (1988)
on Leucaena, Wanapat et al. (1989) on cassava revealed that those
crop residues being high in protein and mineral markedly increased
straw intake and digestibility. However, limited information has
been available on characteristics of DM and CP degradation in the
rumen and digestibility in the lower digestive tract of protein
sources locally used for livestock in the tropics with special
reference to Thailand, especially in cattle fed with untreated and
urea-traeted rice straw.
Wanapat et al. (1996) reported that milk production of crossbred
Holstein-Zebu cows fed a low protein basal diet of rice straw and
cassava chips was markedly improved when cottonseed meal supplement
was increased from 2 to 4 kg/day while Blackwelder et al. (1998)
suggested that cottonseed meal in the diet can be substituted for
soybean meal, resulting in similar milk production and composition.
This feeding system is an economically attractive to farmers who
traditionally use commercial concentrates.
These experiments under this thesis were therefore conducted to
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