Review on Nutritional Limitations and Opportunities of using Rapeseed Meal and other Rape Seed by - Products in Animal Feeding

Abstract

The worldwide increasing demand for proteins as human nutrition and animal feeding leads to a growing interest on other protein sources. Therefore, rapeseed as an established raw material for the production of edible oils could be a promising alternative protein sources for animals. Mustard seed or rapeseed meals are one of the major protein sources for animals in most parts of the world. The utilization and marketing of these rapeseed meals is very limited due to the presence of anti-nutritional factors in the form of mainly Glucosinolates and erucic acid. But there are still a lot of techniques which reduces the Glucosinolates content to a substantial level and made available as protein source in the diets of livestock and poultry. Therefore, the purpose of this review paper is to identify the limitations and explore the opportunities of using rape seed meal/cake in livestock and poultry diets and propose a recommendation for better use of the resources. The anti-nutritional factors in rapeseed can be reduced by a number of techniques including physical, chemical, biological and crop breeding. But their efficacy varies from one treatment method to the other. Amongst these, crop breeding is the most effective one which is followed by solvent extraction of oil which does not affect the nutritional composition of the feed. Ruminant animals are less susceptible to glucosinolates and other anti-nutritional factors than mono gastric animals. Conventional rapeseed meal can be included up to 10-15% in broiler diets and 7-8% in layers diets and can replace up to 50% of the soybean meal. But canola seeds can be used up to 20% in compound feed formulation and replacing 25-30% of the dietary soybean meal in layers ration without significantly affecting laying performance. This low glucosinolate rapeseed meal can be used freely as soybean meal in the diets of ruminants and up to 20% in broiler diets and 15 in finishing pigs diets. But for better use of these products, further research on development of varieties, treatment methods, economics of feeding, further investigation on amino acid composition and digestibility of different varieties are very important and introduction and evaluation of canola varieties is required.