Morphometry and carcass characteristics of goats submitted to grazing in the Caatinga

Abstract

-The objective of this study was to evaluate morphometric measures, carcass yields, absolute weights and yields of commercial cuts of carcass of kids with no defined breed. Eighteen castrated male goats, with average weight of 15 kg were used. The experimental period lasted 105 days. The experimental design was completely randomized; animals were allocated to three treatments: free grazing without supplementation; restricted grazing without supplementation and free grazing with supplementation. Animals were supplemented (1% of body weight) with forage cactus (Opuntia ficus -indica, Mill) and soybean meal (Glycine max). The feeding consisted of continuous grazing on caatinga. Supplemented animals had higher live slaughter weight and body score, and consequently higher morphometric measures in vivo and in carcasses. The supplementation provided carcasses with higher body weight and body score. For yields of carcass, there was no difference between treatments restricted grazing and grazing with supplementation; supplementation provided carcasses with higher yields. Supplemented animals had higher absolute weights for commercial cuts. Supplementation of grazing goats raised in the caatinga provides animals with higher body weight at slaughter, greater morphometric measures in vivo and in carcass and better body conformation. Therefore, for supplementation, the level used in this experiment is a good alternative in the creation of small ruminants during the dry period in the semi-arid region.

Allometric Growth in Brazilian Naturalized Pigs

“…Yáñez et al (15) stated that some quantitative carcass traits can be predicted from biometric measurements. Chest and rump perimeter as well as rump width, chest width and leg perimeter in meat animals are influenced by the bone base, muscle base and fat deposits, and the adipose tissue deposition mainly in the sternum region (15,16) . Body length, in the other hand, is based only on bone constituents.…”

Substitution of soybean meal for urea in diets based on deferred buffelgrass hay for feedlot sheep

“…In addition to a high proportion of muscles, carcasses considered good-quality should present an adequate amount of intermuscular fat to ensure meat juiciness and tenderness, as well as a good amount of subcutaneous fat to prevent excessive moisture loss during the entire cooling period. Sheep will only deposit intermuscular and subcutaneous fat after depositing abdominal adipose tissues like pelvic fat (Bezerra et al, 2012).…”

A step toward regionalized scale‐consistent agricultural life cycle assessment inventories

“…Data were grouped per agrarian region and per NUTS II region. Animal carcass yields were divided in several types: cattle (Ledic et al 2000), swine (Costa 2015), lamb and kid (ovine) (Santos et al 2008), adult ovine (Xenofonte et al 2009), adult caprine (Bezerra et al 2012), hens (Faria et al 2010), turkey (Castro et al 2014), duck (George et al 2014(George et al ), quail (M ori et al 2005, and rabbit (Pinheiro et al 2011). At the INE database, the units for crops and dairy products' yield are kg per year and for livestock are kg carcass per year However, WBLDB (Nemecek et al 2014) suggests fat-and protein-corrected milk (FPCM) per year, which we calculated according to the International Dairy Federation's formula (IDF 2009).…”

“…Greenhouse gas emissions. For GHG emissions, aggregate values for the country are provided by the Portuguese National Inventory Report on Greenhouse Gases, 1990-2012(APA 2014. This document followed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC 2006) guidelines, and as such is consistent with the 2 methodological guides for LCI adaptation.…”