Controlled lamb study links dried leftover food to growth and carcass gains

Replacing part or all of the wheat bran in a grass-hay diet with dried leftover food increased feed intake, growth and several carcass measurements in a controlled feeding study of 30 growing Tigray Highland lambs. The experiment provides evidence for dried leftover food as a partial or complete substitute for wheat bran under the study’s controlled conditions, but it does not establish the same outcomes in commercial sheep flocks. Researchers used a randomized complete block design to divide the lambs among five dietary treatments, with six replicates per treatment.

Wheat bran was replaced with dried leftover food at 0%, 34%, 61%, 82% and 100% on a crude-protein basis. The replacement ingredient contained 12% crude protein, 6% ash and 27% neutral-detergent fiber. Across the diets, crude-protein and energy values remained similar as the proportion of dried leftover food increased, while neutral-detergent-fiber content decreased.

This formulation allowed the investigators to compare diets that broadly maintained protein and energy levels while changing the amount of wheat bran and dried leftover food. The measured outcomes included feed intake, diet digestibility, body-weight gain and carcass characteristics. Average dry-matter intake in the four supplemented groups was 34–131 grams per day higher than in the control group, and the difference was reported as statistically significant at p < 0.05.

Lambs fed dried leftover food also had higher average daily gains, with the supplemented range of 86.01–110.55 grams exceeding the control value of 67.78 grams. These were group-level results, and the reported range does not establish that performance rose steadily with each increase in replacement level or identify a unique optimum among the four supplemented diets. Carcass results showed a parallel pattern.

Hot carcass weight, empty-body weight, dressing percentage, rib-eye muscle area and total usable product were each significantly greater in the supplemented groups than in the control group, again at p < 0.05. These measurements describe carcass yield and composition-related traits recorded in the experiment. The supplied findings do not provide numerical results for every individual carcass measure, and they do not include separate results for laboratory meat-quality testing.

The central result is therefore not that the treatment altered an unspecified quality attribute, but that lambs receiving dried leftover food achieved higher measured values for the listed carcass traits than the control lambs. On the basis of the study, the authors concluded that dried leftover food can replace wheat bran over a 60–100% range while maintaining or improving growth, body-weight gain and feed efficiency in sheep receiving a basal grass-hay diet. That conclusion applies to the diets and animals tested in this experiment: 30 growing Tigray Highland lambs allocated across five treatments in a randomized complete block design.

The trial was not a comparison of commercial farms, and the reported evidence does not show how the ingredient would perform in other herds or feeding systems. Within the study’s scope, however, the results identify dried leftover food as a promising replacement for wheat bran in grass-hay-based sheep diets, with improvements observed across feed intake, growth and carcass measurements rather than in a single endpoint alone.

Subject of Research: Dietary wheat-bran replacement with dried leftover food in growing sheep fed grass hay

Article Title: Replacement of wheat bran with dried leftover food improves performance and carcass traits of grass hay-fed sheep

Article References: Gebremariam, T., Gebremariam, B., & Tadesse, A. (2026). Replacement of wheat bran with dried leftover food improves performance and carcass traits of grass hay-fed sheep. Discover Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43621-026-04401-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43621-026-04401-4

Keywords: sheep nutrition, dried leftover food, wheat bran, grass hay, feed intake, weight gain, carcass traits, Tigray Highland lambs, animal feeding, randomized feeding trial, Replacement, wheat