The nutrient requirements of growing lambs are determined by the production potential of the animal, i.e. to enable lambs to grow with a growth rate of above 400 g/day, diets in practice often consist of ad libitum concentrate and silage or of more than 50% concentrate in TMR. It has been shown that growing lambs can cope with as low roughage proportions as the equivalence of 2% straw in the diet dry matter (DM; Weston, 1974). In the Nordic countries, the forage part of the diet most often consists of grass silage, as the favourable climate conditions enable production of grass silages of high digestibility.As early maturing varieties of forage maize have been developed in recent years, it is now possible to obtain yields above 10 t DM/ha of a forage with high starch concentrations (>350 g/kg DM) even in Northern countries (Mussadiq, 2012). However, when the growing season becomes shortened by cold spring or early frost in the autumn, the harvest must occur at an earlier than desired maturity stage, leading to lower starch concentrations (<300 g/kg DM; NCIS, 1998 and Ritchie et al., 1997). Nevertheless, whole-crop maize silage can be produced at similar costs as grass silage (Nadeau et al., 2012) and inclusion of maize silage has been shown to increase feed intake and performance in beef and dairy cattle (Keady, 2005). Furthermore, maize silage has been shown to increase feed intake and diet digestibility in wethers when partly replacing early and late harvested grass silages (Vranić et al., 2008). Contrariwise, when replacing grass silage with maize silage in diets of pregnant and lactating ewes, O’Doherty et al. (1997) found no effect on intake or performance. Also, Keady and Hanrahan (2013) showed no effect on performance in finishing lambs fed high feed value maize silage (28% starch of DM) as compared to medium feed value maize silage (3.3% starch of DM). As maize silage typically contains less than 100 g crude protein (CP) per kg DM (Mussadiq et al., 2012), to meet the requirements (NRC, 2007) and to fully exploit the high growth potential of finishing lambs, it is necessary to supplement maize silage with additional protein. The authors of the present study found no previous studies on the effects of maize maturity stage at harvest or dietary inclusion rate of maize silage in lambs with high growth capacity (>400 g/day), when fed concentrate-based diets.The objective of this study was to evaluate the hypothesis that feed intake will increase and performance of lambs will be improved by (1) delaying maize harvest from dough to dent stage, and by, (2) increasing the inclusion rate of maize silage from 50 to 100% of the forage proportion of the diets, when the diets are formulated for equal concentrations of metabolizable energy and crude protein in DM.
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