Development of an in vitro technique to determine digestibility of high fibre pig feed.

M. Tech. Animal Sciences.The main objective of this study is to develop an in vitro technique to determine the digestibility of high fibre pig feeds in order to improve pig feed formulation. An in vitro digestibility technique as an alternative to the costly, labour intensive, time consuming and ethically difficult in vivo method was developed to determine the digestibility of fibrous pig feeds. Effects of bag pore size, bag pretreatment, sample size, particle size, incubation time, enzyme concentration, fibrolytic enzymes' cocktail activity and buffer quantity on in vitro dry matter digestibility of selected feedstuffs were evaluated