Abstract The objective of this experiment was to evaluate the value of palm oil as an ingredient in cattle feed compared to no fat or tallow on performance and carcass characteristics. Steers (n = 430; 472 kg; SD = 22) were allocated to 40 pens in a generalized randomized block design consisting of 3 blocks where steers were blocked by weight and assigned randomly to pens. Pens were assigned randomly to 1 of 5 dietary treatments consisting of different sources of fat supplemented at 3.5% of the diet DM: 1) No oil; negative control containing 0% supplemental fat, 2) Tallow; positive control, 3) Crude palm oil, 4) Refined, bleached, and de-odorized palm olein oil, RBD olein and 5) Crude, high oleic, palm oil, crude HOPO. Cattle were fed for a total of 160 days, and due to a delay in obtaining the palm oils from Colombia, cattle received treatments for the last 107 days before slaughter. Performance is calculated using the last 107 days of the feeding period. Dry matter intake of cattle was not different among any of the treatments (P = 0.51). All diets containing supplemental fat had numerically greater ADG and final body weights; however, there were no significant differences among any of the treatments (P 0.39). Due to numerical changes in both intake and gain, differences in G:F due to dietary treatment were observed (P = 0.01). Cattle fed diets containing supplemental fat had greater G:F than those fed no supplemental fat (P = 0.01). Feeding cattle crude palm resulted in greater G:F (0.169) than cattle fed RBD olein (0.164; P = 0.06), while steers fed tallow (0.167) and crude HOPO (0.165) were intermediate (P 0.15). There were no differences in carcass weight, marbling score, or ribeye area due to treatment (P 0.30). The results of this study indicate that feeding palm oil products as a source of supplemental fat in finishing diets is comparable to feeding tallow, as cattle fed diets containing supplemental fat experienced improvements in feed efficiency. Feeding crude palm oil resulted in the greatest percent improvement in feed efficiency over the control diet (7.0%) while RBD olein had the lowest percent improvement (3.8%), with crude HOPO (4.4%) and tallow (5.7%) being intermediate. While palm oil sources may differ slightly in their dietary energy content, all palm oil treatments improved feed efficiency over the negative control and are comparable to tallow.
Johnson et al. (Wed,) studied this question.