Performance and qualitative characteristics of carcasses and meat of lambs finished in confinement and fed diets containing soybean grain or protected fat

The objective of this work was to evaluate performance, carcass traits and meat quality of Santa Ines lambs, finished in feedlot, fed diets containing 60% concentrate and enriched with soybean grain or with protected fat. The concentrates were composed with soybean meal, corn, wheat meal, urea, mineral mixture, soybean grain or protected fat. Tifton-85 hay was used as roughage. It was used 24 lambs with approximately 19.30 +/- 1.77 kg and at average age of five months. The animals were housed in individual pens for a period of 105 days (21 days of adaptation and 84 days of experimental period). The animals were weighed at the beginning of the experimental period and at every 28-day interval aiming at following weight gains in the animals. When the experiment finished, the animals were slaughtered for measurements on carcasses and assassement of quantitative characteristics. After cooling carcasses for 24 hours, samples were taken from the loin for meat quality analysis. The experimental design was a completely randomized design with three treatments and eight replicates. Animals fed protected fed presented better feed conversion (4.80 and 4.06, respectively). Diets enriched with soybean grain or protected fat do not promote significant differences on carcass traits and meat quality neither.