PERFORMANCE OF BROILER CHICKENS FED DIFFERENT COMMERCIAL FEED IN BAUCHI, BAUCHI STATE, NIGERIA

Abstract

An experiment was conducted to evaluate the performance of broiler chickens fed different commercial feeds available in Bauchi, Bauchi State, Nigeria. A total of 225-day old broiler chickens from Zartech Ltd were fed 5 different commercial feeds for duration of 35 days to compare the performance of broiler chickens. Feed intake of the dietary groups differed significantly (P<0.05). T4 dietary group showed high trend of feed consumption (75g) while the lowest feed intake was recorded in treatment 3 (48g).The body weight gain was highest (44.79g) in T5 dietary group (P<0.05) which was statistically similar with T2 and T4 groups and lowest body weight gain was observed in treatment 3 (20.91g). Higher FCR value (P<0.05) was observed in T3 dietary group which indicated low feed conversion efficiency. T3 showed high percent of survivability. Significant difference was obtained for meat yield parameters such as body weights, liver weight, abdominal fat, heart weight, dressed carcass and edible carcass weight. The result of the experiment from biological responses of birds gave an impression that commercial feeds of the feed mills T2, T4 and T5 were found to be better than those of T1 and T3 for the production of broiler chickens for the age duration of day old to 35 days