Nutritive value of green or yellow foxtail, wild oats, wild buckwheat or redroot pigweed seed as determined with the rat.

Pure green foxtail (Setaria viridis Beauv.), yellow foxtail (Setaria lutescens Hubb.), wild oats (Avena fatua L.), wild buckwehat (Polygonum convolvulus L.) and redroot pigweed (Amaranthus retroflexus L.) seeds were fed to growing male rats in two experiments. In the first experiment, green or yellow foxtail and wild oats seeds were found to be first-limiting in the amino acid lysine. Green or yellow foxtail seed supplemented with lysine produced satisfactory rat growth. Digestible energy (DE) values of lysine-supplemented diets were: 3.478, 3.068 and 2.696 kcal/g dry matter (DM) for green foxtail, yellow foxtail and wild oats, respectively. Protein digestibility values were 77.1, 68.6 and 54.2 for the respective diets. Wild oats were accepted poorly by the rats, even after lysine supplementation. In the second experiment, rats required approximately 7 days to adapt to voluntary consumption of an amino acid-supplemented wild buckwheat diet. Moderate weight gain of weanling male rats was obtained because of high consumption of the wild buckwheat diet, which had 2.206 kcal DE/g DM and 52.5% crude protein digestibility. In contrast, initial high acceptability of the redroot pigweed diet quickly declined. Digestibility values for the redroot pigweed diet were 2.884 kcal DE/g DM and 54.6% rude protein digestibility. The relationship between digestibility values obtained with rats and those obtained with swine is discussed.