Ingestion behaviour of ruminants grazing Brachiaria decumbens grass Brazils Middle-West

Abstract

An experiment has been carried out aiming to evaluate the ingestion behavior of young heifers, heifers and cows in pastures of Brachiaria decumbens, in the system of continuous stocking with three categories representing the treatments, each one with ten repetitions. The experimental period  was of 30 days, being 20 for adaptation of the experimental animals and 10 for three evaluations with duration of 24 hours each, in intervals of five days. The results of the Tukey test demonstrated that the cows grazed during more time (12 hours) than the young heifers (0.5 hours) and the heifers (10.25 hours). Statistic differences were not observed among the animals for the rumination time (7.25, 7.39 and 7.40, respectivety). The cows displayed larger bite rate (41.30) than the heifers and the young heifers. This result suggest that there was a compensatory mechanism between the times of grazing and the bite rates, so that the animals with more nutritional requirement regulated the amount of ingested forage, incrementing the grazing time.