An endless phase of animal nutrition research deals with efficiency of rations, that is, the pounds gained by the animal per pound of feed consumed. The standard form of such research is to feed groups of animals on different rations for several weeks or months and determine average change in weight per pound of feed used.
In recent years scientists have used chemical tests to compare the amount of calcium in the diet against the amount excreted. The apparent digestibility of such minerals has thus been computed for different rations. Yet one important source of error in these chemical tests plagued researchers.
There is a “turnover” in nutrients fed to animals; elements in feed are absorbed into the animal’s body, retained for a time, and later excreted. For example, a cow actually loses more calcium (through milk and excreta) during the first six months of milk production than her normal ration contains. As long as the amount of recycling was unknown, scientists could not tell, for instance, how much calcium in alfalfa hay could be digested by simply measuring incoming and outgoing calcium.
Formerly scientists could study the problem only by withholding all calcium from the diet. Under this unnatural condition all outgoing calcium came from the animal’s body.
With radioactive calcium in a steer’s diet (or injected into the blood), scientists can quickly tell how much of the excreted calcium comes from the animal’s blood and organs under normal conditions. In a typical instance a ration thought to have 24 per cent digestible calcium, chemically determined, was found to have 38 per cent by the tracer technique.
The tracer method shows that milk contains phosphorus, only 20 per cent of which may come from the feed and 80 per cent from the cow’s bones. With eggs, about 65 per cent of the phosphorus is provided by feed and 35 per cent by the hen. Radioactive tracers permit measurement of such “biological pathways,” as the biochemist calls them.
Can Lean Meat be Estimated “on the Hoof”?
The proof of the ration, one might say, is in the cutting. That is, the worth of a particular feed was formerly unknown until the carcass had been cut and priced.
Because of the time and expense, researchers in the past have merely tested groups of animals on a ration for a few weeks and then estimated the total gain by weighing and measuring. The main drawback to such a method is that it measures total growth only. In meat animals, knowing total growth is less important than knowing how much gain is in the more valuable lean meat, how much is in fat, and how much merely water. Techniques based on atomic energy have provided a new approach without adding radioactive contamination to the animal.