Colocasia esculenta var. antiquorum known as Taro or Cocoyam is widely distributed in the humid tropics including India and
South East Asia. Taro is recognized as a large coarse herb with crowns of large oblong-oval leaves and an abundance of large
spherical underground tubers. Taro can be grown under flooded or upland conditions and it is one of the important crops for poor
resource farmers in the tropics. In Cambodia, Taro is known in Khmer as ‘Trao’. It is planted for home consumption of both tubers
and petioles. However, when there is production in excess of household needs, Taro leaves and petioles are cooked and fed to pigs.
Taro leaves are rich in protein, minerals and vitamins. The aim of the present experiment was to study the effect of ensiling or drying Taro leaves on intake, digestibility and N retention
of growing pigs given a basal diet of rice bran mixed with broken rice or rice bran mixed with cassava root meal. It was found that the apparently higher nutritive value of sun-dried compared with ensiled Taro leaves may have been caused by inadequacies in the ensiling process, resulting in excessive breakdown of the protein and poor palatability.
Also, the relatively high values of N retention (equivalent to about 250 g/day of live weight gain) and of retained N as a proportion of digested N in the diet with sun-dried Taro leaves, are indicative of a high biological value of the Taro leaf protein, especially it represented over 80% of the dietary crude protein these diets.