Summary
This review examines nutrient utilisation and requirements in sheep and goats across contrasting production systems, with emphasis on tropical and resource-limited contexts where low-quality, high-fibre feeds such as straw and hay are commonly used. The paper likely synthesises existing literature on how substandard diets constrain feed intake, digestion, and nutrient availability, and explores novel feed strategies to address nutritional shortfalls in small ruminant meat production. It provides a comparative framework for understanding how environmental and system-level variation influences the nutritional management of small ruminants.
UK applicability
The findings are most directly relevant to tropical and low-income farming contexts, though the underlying principles of fibre digestibility and nutrient requirements in small ruminants have some applicability to UK sheep systems, particularly where low-quality forage or novel feed ingredients are being evaluated as cost-reduction strategies.
Key measures
Feed intake; digestibility coefficients; nutrient absorption; dietary nutrient requirements; fibre content of feeds; production performance (meat yield)
Outcomes reported
The study examined how nutrient utilisation and dietary requirements vary in sheep and goats raised under different production systems, with particular focus on the effects of feeding low-nutritional novel feeds on feed intake, digestion, and nutrient absorption for meat production.
Topic tags
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