Fungal treatment of lignocellulosic biomass is the key to efficient ruminant production in Vietnam

Ruminant production in Vietnam is low due to the low quality of local feed resources, roughages in particular. The commonly used roughages (e.g. rice straw) are characterized by high lignin contents and, therefore, a low rumen degradability. In addition, large amounts of potentially valuable roughages are burned, causing environmental pollution. Fungi treatment of high lignin biomass (including rice straw) has been shown to be a highly promising biological, environmental friendly treatment (Tuyen et al., 2012, Tuyen et al., 2013, Van Kuijk, 2016) to improve (rumen) degradability, which can lead to a greater ruminant production. The technology is proven to be highly effective at a laboratory scale and the application of fungi under more practical conditions is the next step in the process towards large scale application of the technology. An advantage of the fungi treatment is the production of acids, making the biomass very easy to conserve. The aim of this project is to contribute to the knowledge required to make the fungi technology available for practical, large scale application. Many challenges must be solved, such as sterilization or pasteurization of large quantities of biomass, addition of inoculum, aeration during the fungal incubation, etc. Also animal feeding experiments have to be conducted with the fungal treated straw to determine its nutritive value