Beef cattle supplementation maintained on pasture of “Panicum maximum” cv. Tanzânia-1 on rainy season

Abstract

The objective with this study was to evaluate the effect of different supplementation levels in Nelore bulls during rainy season. It was used 32 Nelore bulls with 18 months old and 374 Kg of body live weight (LW), which were submitted to one of the four treatments: T1, pasture with mineral salt; T2, pasture plus 0.2% of LW of concentrate ration; T3, pasture plus 0.4% of LW with concentrate ration; T4, pasture plus 0.6% of LW with concentrate ration. Animals were kept on pastures of Panicum maximum cv. Tanzânia-1 divided in four fields with 3 hectares, for each group. Supplements were constituted of mineral salt, corn meal, soybean meal, soybean hulls and urea. Animals were weighed at the beginning and every 28 days to determinate average daily weight gain (ADG), and kept under rotational grazing and pasture mass availability was evaluated. ADG was not influenced by the levels of supplement. The use of Tanzania grass with adequate mass pasture availability allowed higher performance of the beef cattle in rainy season, that presented ADG of 0.99kg/animal.