Abstract
Dietary wood charcoal can be a potential low-cost feed supplement for the improvement of performance in broiler chicken production, while reducing loss of nutrients through birds’ excreta. However, it has no nutritive value and excess feeding may lead to constipation and thereby hamper birds’ production performance. An experiment was conducted with a total of 24 male broiler chickens which were subjected to a commercial broiler finisher diet with 0, 1.5, 3, and 6% wood charcoal (on a dry matter basis), respectively. This was to ascertain the level of dietary wood charcoal that can be included in a commercial broiler feed without negative effects on production performance of broiler chickens, nutrient utilization and losses through birds’ excreta under adverse climatic conditions in Northern Ghana. Birds’ feed consumption, body weight gain, as well as excreta quality were assessed for four days. Results showed that dietary wood charcoal can replace up to 6% of a commercial broiler chicken feed without negative effects on growth performance, nutrient utilization and excreta consistency, while reducing the phosphorous concentration in broiler excreta. Future research should analyze the long-term effect of feeding charcoal on performance and health of laying hens. Key words: Broiler chickens, dietary wood charcoal, nutrient utilization, production performance, excreta quality.
Highlights
Poultry production is the fastest growing livestock sector in Ghana (FAO, 2005)
Twenty-four 4-week-old healthy male Cobb 500 strain broiler chickens of similar body weight were randomly selected from the experimental flock of University for Development Studies (UDS) and transferred to individual cages with a wire floor (1.6 x 1.4 x 1.6 m3) in a separate house which paved way for natural ventilation
The total feed consumption did not differ across dietary treatments (P > 0.05), resulting in comparable, feed conversion rates across dietary treatments (P > 0.05; Table 2)
Summary
High feed costs increase the overall cost of production for poultry keepers which could negatively affect its economic sustainability (Sumberg et al, 2017). Increase in temperature reduces the efficient utilization of feed required for optimum body weight of birds (De Moura et al, 2015). The reported body weights of broiler chickens in Ghana typically are 2.6 to 2.7 kg after nine weeks with a feed conversion rate of 3.3 to 3.6 at the finisher phase (Oppong-Sekyere et al, 2012). Charcoal has been proposed as feed additive to stimulate feed intake and digestion, thereby enhancing growth performance of broiler chickens in Iran, Cameroon and Poland (Khadem et al, 2012; Kana et al, 2011; Majewska et al, 2011). Charcoal has a good adsorption capability of toxins and has the potential to improve birds’ health (Khadem et al, 2012; Rafiu et al, 2014)
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