2.1. Experimental Design, Animals, and Feeding

The present research was carried out with 28 dairy goats of French Alpine breed at a commercial family farm in Osijek, Croatia (Osijek-Baranya County). Goats had kidded in a period of one week. To allow the rumen to fully adapt to experimental diets, animals were subjected to experiment (12th ± 3 days of lactation) after seven days of adaptation period. This research is part of a larger study from which some part of the milk results was published in Klir et al. [13] and Klir Šalavardić et al. [14]. Duration of the current study was 75 days, with three treatments and three processing periods. The sampling was conducted when goats were in the 32nd, 60th, and 87th (±3 days) days of lactation. Goats were kept together in the barn and machine milked in the morning and evening. All goats were healthy with adequate body condition score (2.9) and average age of 3.6 years when the experiment started. Goats’ feeding was based on red clover and grass hay (ad libitum), and in addition, each goat received 1 kg/day of a concentrate mixture. Goats were fed individually in separated feeding troughs in the milking parlour. All goats had free access to fresh water, and no refusals of concentrate mixtures were observed.

There were three diets used in the experiment (Table 1): 1—basal diet based on extruded soybean and soybean meal; 2—basal diet with 90 g/kg DM of extruded linseed (ELS) partially replacing soybean; and 3—basal diet with 160 g/kg DM pumpkin seed cake (PSC) completely replacing soybean.

Ingredient and nutrient composition of control, extruded linseed (ELS), and pumpkin seed cake (PSC) experimental diets.