In Kabarak, near Kampi ya Moto shopping centre, Rawhide Ltd Dairy Farm manager Juma Kiboi has doubled milk production by using naturally occurring microbes to pre-ferment feeds.
According to Henry Ambwere, the Nakuru-based entrepreneur who developed the supplement, the naturally occurring bacteria helps in pre-digesting feeds to make it easy for the animal to utilise all the nutrients, thereby increasing the body mass and milk production.
“Ordinarily, a cow ferments the fodder it eats during rumination, before sending the same to a different chamber of the stomach,” Ambwere said.
But the animal may fail to fully digest some feed. It ends up producing dung that is full of energy and proteins when analysed in a laboratory.
“This is wrong. When we purchase feeds, we are actually buying energy and proteins to help the animal increase its body mass. We also expect it to produce sufficient milk. We should not be throwing away important nutrients through dung,” he says.
When the microbes are applied on the feeds a day before being given to an animal, they kick off natural fermentation outside the stomach, thereby unleashing the nutrients that could be hidden in overgrown grasses, for example, which the rumen may not break down.
According to Bockline Omedo Bebe, a Professor of Livestock Production Systems and acting Egerton University Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Research and Extension, as long as such microbes are safe for animal and human consumption, they have the ability to break down a plant enzyme known as lignin, thereby unlocking and making hidden nutrients available to the animals.
Lignin is a class of complex organic polymer that forms key structural materials in the support tissues of most plants.
In animal nutrition, lignin is considered an anti-nutritive component of forages as it cannot be readily fermented by microbes in the rumen.
“Scientists are also studying microbes from different wild animals to understand how they use very low-quality fibrous feeds but realise outstanding digestion performance,” Prof Bebe told the Seeds of Gold.
According to Ambwere, the organic supplement, also known as MolaPlus Livestock Microbes, has been attempted on very dry maize stovers, and overgrown Napier grass.
“At Rawhide Farm, we only use the supplement on dairy meal. Whenever used, we get 28,000 litres of milk. If we stop even for a day, the production goes back to 14,000 litres,” Kiboi said.
The dairy meal at Rawhide is inoculated with the microbes and left to ferment for 24 hours before being given to the animals.
“During fermentation, the microbes multiply in trillions every few hours. Those that expire form what we call microbial protein, which can be utilised by the animals without further digestion,” he says.
A recent study by Guizhou Normal, Guiyang and Shanxi Agricultural Universities in China found microbial fermented feed to be an important part of feed industry.
The study, led by Xiaopeng Tang – a livestock researcher – found that fermented complete feeds had an effect on the improvement of growth performance, serum biochemical profile, carcass traits, meat proximate composition, amino acid and fatty acid profile.
The fermented complete feeds also significantly reduce the relative abundance of presumably pathogenic bacteria of phylum Proteobacteria and genus Escherichia–Shigella and enhance the relative abundances of likely beneficial bacteria of phylum Firmicutes and genus Clostridium.
Kiboi says Rawhide Farm subjected the feeds inoculated with the microbes to a laboratory test for aflatoxin in comparison with dry feeds.
The result showed that such feeds had more suppressed aflatoxin levels than dry feeds from the same stock of feeds.
