Dried Sugarcane Press Residue As a Potential Feed Ingredient Source of Nutrients for Poultry (Report‪)‬

INTRODUCTION The poultry industry is one of the most profitable businesses of agriculture and provides nutritious meat and eggs for human consumption within the shortest possible time. However, the availability of feed ingredients at affordable cost is a key to successful poultry operations (Basak et al., 2002). There is a genuine need to economize poultry rations by utilizing the agro-industrial byproducts. Sugarcane press residue (SPR) (also referred to as sugarcane mud, sugarcane filter mud, filter press cake, fiber cake, clarification mud, filter mud and scum), a byproduct of sugar industry, is one such potential material available to the tune of 3.6 million tons annually in India. It is a soft, spongy, amorphous dark brown material containing sugars, fiber, coagulated colloids including wax, apart from containing albuminoids, organic salts, etc. and rich in organic carbon and N, P, Ca, Fe and Mn (Singh and Solomon, 1995). Currently, SPR is used as soil conditioner but the majority of it remains unrecycled due to lack of proper technology and thus poses environmental problems. Recent reports (Budeppa et al., 2008) indicated that young birds such as broilers tolerated low levels of SPR (up to 3%) while adults such as layers tolerated higher SPR (up to 15%) levels in their diets (Suma et al., 2007). According to them, SPR contains substantial amounts of lipids and crude fiber. Both the lipids and fiber fractions in SPR appear to find their way largely from the residual vegetative portion of cane. On one hand, absence of fiber degrading enzymes in the digestive tract of birds might necessitate their supplementation in feed. On the other hand, given the fact that higher level of lipids exist in SPR, addition of lipase and lecithin in diets may help to better the hydrolysis and emulsification of SPR's lipids and complement the action of in situ lipase and lecithin. Yet, the information available in both broilers and layers is not sufficient to include SPR in practical poultry diets. Therefore, an effort was made to determine nutrient constituents and metabolizable energy value of SPR for broilers and layers separately.