Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 November 2017
Since the cell wall content (CWC) and cell wall digestibility are the main factors influencing the animal's energy supply from forages, the ability to accurately measure CWC is crucial. This is becoming increasingly important as feed evaluation methods move towards a more dynamic approach of assessing nutrient supply from a wide range of substrates in order to reflect the two-stage nature of digestion in ruminants. Originally developed for forages, the neutral detergent fibre (NDF) procedure of Goering and Van Soest (1970) is generally regarded as providing a satisfactory measure of CWC despite the fact that varying amounts of cell wall pectins are soluble in neutral detergent solution (Chesson, 1986). However, previous work (IVVO, 1991) suggests that sample drying temperature and other factors can influence the measurement of CWC. An experiment was undertaken to study the effect of different drying temperatures and method of NDF analysis on the measurement of CWC in different forage types.