Growth performance of broiler chickens on diets formulated from local ingredients.

Abstract

An experiment was conducted to study growth performance of broiler chickens fed five treatment diets formulated using sorghum, copra meal (CM), palm kernel meal (PKM), sweet potato wagi besta (SPWB) variety and sweet potato SI. 172 (SPIL) variety as energy sources and to correlate this performance with estimates of metabolisable energy content of the diets. There were five chickens per replicate and four replicates per treatment and feeding period was five weeks after three weeks of brooding. Replicates were randomly assigned to 20 rooms located in an open shed at the National Agricultural Research Institute, Lae, Papua New Guinea. A rapid bioassay method was used to estimate metabolisable energy content (in mJ/kg) of the diets to be 13.64, 13.53, 13.44, 13.55 and 13.54 for Sorghum, PKM, CM, SPWB and SPIL diets respectively. Body weight gains of chickens on the five diets were not significantly different indicating that the local ingredients could be used to feed chickens. However feed intake and feed conversion ratios varied between diets. Feed intake was found to be inversely related to energy content of the diets generally.