Mulberry leaves found nutritious for livestock

Publication date: Tuesday, 23rd May, 2006

PROTEIN-RICH: Dairy cows and goats like the taste of mulberry leaves

By John Kasozi
MULBERRY (Morus alba), locally known as ‘nkenene,’ is a multi-purpose fodder shrub. It plays an important role in the nutritional security of both animals and people.
Its sweet fruits are highly valuable and eaten mainly by children, while its leaves provide high-quality feed for small ruminants.
Kenyan farmers have been feeding cows and goats on mulberry leaves since the 1990s. Ugandan farmers have also begun making use of it.
William Opio, a senior trainer with St Jude Family Projects in Masaka, says mulberry was previously planted for the silkworm industry and taken as a fruit by children.
“Now we give it to livestock. Although it is still little, we mix mulberry with fresh forages (grasses and legumes) to get a balanced diet,” he says.
Fresh grasses like Tanzania (kakira kambwa), elephant and guatemala are a source of carbohydrate and contribute 70% to the diet.
Fresh legumes like mulberry, calliandra (kalibwambuzi), sesbania (muzimbandegeya), leucaena, tephrosia (muluku), lablab, gliricidia (mutamesse) and ipomea temirostris (ekabowabowa) are protein-giving foods. They work as a dairy meal.
Opio says the cows and goats graze and browse every type of grass and shrub.
“We have saanen, torgenburg and boar goats,” he says.
“Among the legumes, it is mulberry and calliandra that are consumed first. Fresh forages are cut on a daily basis, chopped, mixed and fed to animals,” he says.
According to Paths to Prosperity Report, International Centre for Research in Agroforestry (ICRAF) 1998-99, a similar experiment was carried out in central Kenya in 1997-98 to determine the voluntary intake of tree-shrub fodder supplements by heifers.
Mulberry had the highest voluntary intake of the fodder used in this trial, compared to dairy meal.
The high voluntary intake and the fact that the bark was eaten are indications of mulberry’s high nutrition. Sweetness is an important factor in the voluntary intake of fodder.
With each type of fodder, cattle were able to select the more nutritious parts. And their selective feeding, together with the level of supplement intake, determined the amount of nutrients they consumed.
As a result, cattle produced more milk when given mulberry than when given calliandra or leucaena. The extent to which farmers used mulberry as fodder for dairy cattle was similar to the extent they used calliandra and leucaena.
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