Evaluation of bag rinsing procedures (manual vs machine) in the in situ ruminal degradation technique

Abstract

A comparison was made between manual and machine rinsing procedures for ruminal incubation bags in an effort to standardize this important stage in ruminal incubation analysis. Three forage materials were ruminally incubated in reverse order for 96, 72, 48, 36, 24 and 12 h (eight bags per time). Incubated sample bags were divided equally between the manual rinsing (under running water) and machine rinsing (five cycles, 5 min each with water change after each cycle) procedures. No difference was found between the two procedures (P>0.05). Dry matter disappearance percentage after each incubation time was described as: machine = 0.08 (SE 2.995) + 0.973 (SE 0.0801) manual, r2 0.9696. The slope for the data did not differ from 1 and the intercept did not vary from 0 (P>0.05). It was concluded that if the machine and manual rinsing methods are standardized, they will produce similar results.