Development and Evaluation of Cerea (Autoclaved Cereal 4- Urea) Products for Ruminant Feeding

To study the performance of different cereals and their autoclaved (15 psi) urea mixtures (Cerea), seven cereals (wheat, maize, barley, paddy, oats, sorghum and fosjra (pearl millet), four urea levels (0,5,20 and 15%) and four autoclaving periods (0, 5, 10 and 15 min) were selected. The untreated cereals differed significantly with respect to total carbohydrates (mom-structural), soluble sugars, total-N, ADF-N, and amino-N contents. Autoclavingresulted insignificant changes In the carbohydrate and N-profile of Cerea products. Cereal species, urea level and antoclaving period had significant effect on total-N, bound (urease- resistant)-N, amino-N and ADF-N. The mean total-N of Cerea products was maximum with wheat (5.80%) followed by sorghum (4.99%), oats (4.77%) barley (4.69%), maize (4.63%) bajra (4.57%) and paddy (4.23%). The mean bound-N content (% of total-N of Cerea products) was highest with wheat (38%) followed by sorghum (30%) naddy (28%) barley (26.2%) bajra (23.0%) maize (19.9%) and oats (15 6%) Except for maize the bound-N was more or less related to the soluble sugar content of the corresponding cereals and the increase in ADF-N was sgnificantly related to the bound-N content Autoclaving of cereals alone resulted in partial transformation of availabl amino-N and soluble sugars into nnn available ADF-N The N-loss during Cerea processing varied from 5 to 12% except for wheat where these losses were 2 to 5%.