Effect of Dietary Chromium Supplementation on Growth Performance, Rumen Fermentation Characteristics and Some Blood Serum Units of Fattening Dairy Calves under Heat Stress

Authors

  • M.A. Soltan Department of Nutrition and Veterinary Clinical Nutrition, Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, Alexandria University, Alexandria, Egypt
  • A.M. Almujalli Department of Clinical Studies, College of Veterinary Medicine and Natural Resources, King Faisal University, Saudi Arabia
  • M.A. Mandour Department of Vetrinary Public Health and Animal Husbandry, College of Veterinary Medicine and Natural Resources, King Faisal University, Saudi Arabia
  • M. El-Shinway Abeer Animal Health Institute, Kafer El-Shakh Branch, Egypt

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.3923/pjn.2012.849.854

Keywords:

Chromium, fattening calves, growth performance, rumen fermentation

Abstract

Twenty four fattening dairy calves were assigned to investigate the effect of dietary Chromium (Cr) supplementation (0 or 3 mg Cr/head/day from organic preparation) on the growth performance and rumen fermentation characteristics as well as on some blood serum parameters under heat stress (35-40°C). Chromium supplementation significantly (p<0.05) increased total feed intake across the whole experimental period by about 10% when compared with the control. Moreover chromium supplementation improve body weight at the end of the experiment, weight gain and feed conversion ratio across the whole experiment by about 7.5%, 13% and 2.7% respectively when compared with the control. Serum insulin concentration increased whereas cortisol concentration decreased, when compared with the control group. Also Cr supplementation showed a trend towards improving rumen fermentation characteristics. It could be concluded that dietary Cr supplementation at level of 6 mg/head/day may offer a potential protective management practice to lessen the effect of heat stress in fattening dairy calves.

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Published

15.08.2012

Issue

Vol. 11 No. 9 (2012)

Section

Research Article

License

Copyright (c) 2012 Asian Network for Scientific Information

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

How to Cite

Soltan, M., Almujalli, A., Mandour, M., & Abeer, M. E.-S. (2012). Effect of Dietary Chromium Supplementation on Growth Performance, Rumen Fermentation Characteristics and Some Blood Serum Units of Fattening Dairy Calves under Heat Stress. Pakistan Journal of Nutrition, 11(9), 849–854. https://doi.org/10.3923/pjn.2012.849.854