Good quality roughage is being positive response to increase the production and productivity of ruminant animals was developed as one of the most important way for Bangladesh for fulfilling the growing requirements of feed demand. Fibrous feed like crop residue, green grass, and tree foliages are failed to satisfy the farm animal for increasing the productivity. Quality roughage in terms of biomass yield, chemical composition, nutritional value and cost effectiveness plays an important rules on livestock feed. Increasing food-feed competition and cost with an ever increasing demand for safe and high quality beef or dairy products may be minimized to some extent by improving feed efficiencies of animals. Considering the beef production, 55 to 75 % cost was associated with feed cost [1-3]. Cattle fattening or beef enterprise is an important avenue for income generation for subsistence farmers as well as entrepreneurs. Fodder crops may play pivotal role in the agricultural economy of developing countries by providing cheapest source of feed for livestock. However, the shortage of feeds and fodder both in terms of availability and nutritional quality are major concern to the producers and also considered a major constraint to animal productivity [4]. The country requires 49.2 million tons DM of roughage and 24.0 million tons of concentrate quantitively [5] but filling only 56.2% and 20.0%, respectively of their total requirement in a year. Any effort that i) explores quality feeds and fodders ii) generate production technologies for making their biomass available using agro- ecosystem sustainably & economically, and iii) add value addition technologies for production using available biomass may boost milk and meat production in the country. This requires qualitative evaluation of available roughages both in terms of chemical composition and feeding values to animals, and ranking them accordingly based on their yield, production cost, nutritional value and productivity. Moreover, scaling or ranking of available roughages based on their yield, production cost, nutritional value and productivity in the country is not developed yet. Such a ranking tool or scale may support farmers to feeding their animals cost effectively. Considering the above factors the present research work was undertaken to evaluating intake, digestibility and growth performances of growing cattle fed with Moringa plant fodder or Australian Sweet Jumbo keeping Maize silage as control and to rank the available roughages.
Considering the nutritional quality of roughages and cost of beef production, the roughages may be ranked as Moringa foliage> Maize silage>AS Jumbo silage. However, farmers may use this roughage scale in formulating cost effective diets for making more profit of cattle production. Moreover, these data will lead further development of feeding models for beef production in the country.