Performance and nutrients digestibility of piglets fed ditary detoxified balanites augyptiaca friuts

A feeding trial was conducted to assess the effect of dietary detoxified Nigerian Balanites aegyptiaca fruits on performance and nutrients digestibility of weanling pigs. Twenty pigs weighing averagely 4.5 ± 0.85kg were used for the experiment which lasted for one month. The pigs were randomly allocated to the five dietary treatments in a completely randomized design. Five diets made of a corn-soy control diet and four others to which 20% of boiled, roasted, boiled and roasted, boiled and fermented respectively were used. Feed consumption and weight gain of pigs maintained on the Balanites based diets were comparable with the conventional diet (p > 0.05). However, efficiency of feed utilization on the Balanites containing diets was inferior to that on the control diet (p 0.05) but protein and fat digestibility were significantly influenced by dietary Balanites (p 0.05). Nitrogen consumption using indices of protein intake, fecal nitrogen output, daily retained nitrogen and nitrogen retention coefficient were not significantly different from values obtained on the control diet (p > 0.05). It was therefore concluded that Balanites aegyptiaca fruits, when detoxified by any of the traditional methods adopted, could be incorporated in diets for livestock even up to 70% inclusion level without deleterious effects on animal consuming the feed.