1 ARTICLE IN PRESS ARTICLE IN PRESS Journal of Oil Palm Research DOI: https://doi.org/10.21894/jopr.2020.0064 GROWTH PERFORMANCE AND CARCASS TRAITS OF GOATS FED WITH OIL PALM BY- PRODUCTS BASED FEED PELLET NUR ATIKAH IBRAHIM*; WAN NOORAIDA WAN MOHAMED*; ‘ABIDAH MD NOH* and MOOKIAH SAMINATHAN* ABSTRACT The study was conducted to develop a nutrient-balanced goat feed pellet from oil palm by-products and to assess the effects of the feed pellet on growth performance and carcass traits of Katjang goats. Treatment groups consisted of oil palm by-products based (OPB), control without addition of oil palm by-products control (CNT), and commercial (COM) pellets. Twelve 12-months-old Katjang goats were assigned to the three treatment groups and subjected to 14-weeks of feeding trial. Each group was offered 1.5% body weight (BW) of respective pellets and ad libitum supply of Napier grass. Feed intake (FI) was recorded daily and the BW of the goats was recorded weekly. At the end of the feeding trial, all goats were slaughtered for carcass traits study. All treatment groups showed no significant difference in BW increment (p=0.51) and average daily gain (ADG) (p=0.94). There were no significant differences (p>0.05) between the treatment groups for carcass traits parameters. As a conclusion, the OPB pellet has shown to contain complete nutrient for goat’s diet and was comparable to the COM feed pellet in terms of growth performance of Katjang goat. The inclusion of oil palm by-products in the feed formulation did not adversely affect the carcass traits of the goats. Keywords: goat feed pellet, oil palm by-products, growth performance and carcass traits. Date received: 10 February 2020; Sent for revision: 11 February 2020; Accepted: 9 July 2020. * Malaysian Palm Oil Board, 6 Persiaran Institusi, Bandar Baru Bangi, 43000 Kajang, Selangor, Malaysia. E-mail: atikah.ibrahim@mpob.gov.my INTRODUCTION Utilisation of local resources is one of the approaches to support the growing productivity and sustainability in agriculture industry (Rodriguez and Preston, 1997). Sontakke et al. (2014) described that the utilisation of the agricultural by-products not only could reduce the overall feed cost but could also decrease the competition for food between human and animals. Oil palm plantations in Malaysia covert a total of 5.81 million hectares in 2017 (MPOB, 2018). Crude palm oil (CPO) production for 2018 was 19.52 million tonnes (Kushairi et al., 2018). The huge oil palm plantation area and the volume of CPO production annually have contributed to the increase of waste and by-products. Palm oil industry produces approximately 21.625 t ha -1 of solid biomass annually, which consists of oil palm fronds (OPF), 78%; empty fruit bunches (EFB), 9%; mesocarp fibre (PPF), 6%; oil palm trunks (OPT), 5%; and palm kernel shell, 2% (Hosseini et al., 2015). Most of the oil palm by-products have great potential to be utilised as ingredients in compound ruminant feeds. The proximate composition of the oil palm by-products is presented in Table 1.