COMPARATIVE EVALUATION OF SELF-FORMULATED AND THREE COMMERCIAL DIETS ON THE GROWTH PERFORMANCE OF BROILER STARTER

Abstract

An experiment was conducted to evaluate the performance of broiler chickens fed self-formulated and three different commercial diets. A total of 240-day old cobb broiler chickens from a reputable hatchery were fed a self-formulated diet and 3 different commercial feeds for duration of 21 days to compare their growth performance. Daily feed intake of the dietary groups differed significantly (P<0.05). T2 dietary group showed high trend of feed consumption (99.27g) while the lowest feed intake was recorded on diet 3 (91.41g).The daily body weight gain was highest (58.60g) on diet 5 (P<0.05) which was statistically different (P<0.05) with value obtained on diets 2 (54.50). Lowest body weight gain was observed on diet 3 (35.91g) which was statistically similar with the value obtained on diet 1 (38.29). Higher FCR level (P<0.05) was observed on T3 dietary group which indicated low feed conversion efficiency. The result of the experiment from biological responses of birds gave an impression that commercial feeds of the feed mills T2 and T4 were found to be better than that of T3 and the self-formulated diet. The study recommended diet 4 for broiler starter production.