## 3 Results and Discussions
### Effect of Lactic Acid Bacteria on Maize Silage
The results of the current study could not confirm this conclusion as all homofermentative bacteria used did not significantly reduce silage pH compared to the NC treatment. On the other hand, several studies seem to concur that bacterial inoculants do have a significant effect on the reduction of pH in silage. An accepted explanation as to why the addition of inoculants sometimes does not show an effect on pH reduction is competition with epiphytic LAB [8], and maize silage is known to have a high epiphytic LAB population [33]. During the ensiling process, homofermentative LAB mainly produce lactate as their primary product of sugar fermentation [41]. All treatments had numerically higher (\(p\) = 0.076) lactic acid production compared with NC. The LPA treatment numerically had the highest lactic acid production. The acetate present in the LPA and LA treated maize silages after 40 days of ensiling was higher compared to the NC treatment. The lactate to acetate ratios for the LAB treatments were 3.4, 3.5, and 3.0 for LPA, LPL, and LA treatment, respectively. These lactate to acetate ratios were higher than those reported by [PERSON] et al. [42], however similar to those found by [PERSON] and [PERSON] [10] and [PERSON] and [PERSON] [33] in their studies on LAB-treated maize silage. The ammonia-N as a proportion of total-N was significantly lower (\(p<0.05\)) in the NC treatment than the LPA and LA treatments and similar to the PC and LPL treatments. Among the LAB treatments, the LPL treatment recorded the lowest ammonia-N (Table 2). In the determination of spoilage of the silage, it was found that fungal spoilage was significantly lower in maize silage treated with LPL (\(p<0.05\)) compared with the other LAB treatments but similar to the NC treatment. The number of lactobacilli was lower (\(p<0.05\)) in LPA than that of the rest of the treatments. The effects of LAB inoculated maize silage on in vitro rumen fermentation are shown in Table 3. There was no difference among treatments in dry matter digestibility (DMD). Similar observations were made by [PERSON] et al. [43], where they did not report any differences between LAB-treated silage and the control on DMD after a 24 h in vitro rumen fermentation. Except for the LPA, LAB-treated silages showed numerically higher DMD compared with the NC treatment, although it was not statistically different. A [PERSON] et al. [44] study showed that LAB inoculants could potentially improve DMD, which would, in turn, enhance animal performance. Gas production was significantly different (\(p<0.05\)) across the treatments after a 24 h incubation period. The NC, LPL and LA treatments  
\begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c c c c c c} \hline \hline \multirow{2}{*}{**Item**} & \multicolumn{6}{c}{**Treatment (\(n\) = 3)**} & \multirow{2}{*}{**SEM 2**} & \multirow{2}{*}{_p_} \\ \cline{2-2} \cline{4-7}  & **NC 1** [FOOTNOTE:1]Footnote 1: NC: Negative control ( maize silage without any additives); PC: Positive control ( maize silage treated with commercial silage additives); LPL: maize silage treated with _L. plantarum_; LPA: maize silage treated with _L. plantarum_; LPA: maize silage treated with _L. paracise;_ LA: maize silage treated with _L. acidophilus_. 2 SEM: standard error of the mean. 3,  
had higher gas production compared to the PC and LPA treatments whose gas production was similar. However, the values of PC and LPA seemed to erroneous relative to their DMDDs and it was unclear why such values were obtained. After 6 h of incubation, the pH of treated maize was different (\(p<0.05\)) across the treatment. The pH of the PC and LPA treatments was higher (\(p<0.05\)) than the rest of the treatments. In the present study, a comparison of the fermentation characteristics during ensiling and in vitro rumen fermentation showed that all LAB used were marginally effective in producing quality maize silages. With lower DM loss and pH, and the lower counts of fungi and yeast, _L. plantarum_ appeared to be better for maize silage. These findings are in agreement with previous studies [8; 11].