Abstract
Heaps of rice husk waste is currently increasing around rice mills in Nigeria. Production cost for broilers has risen tremendously due to high cost of feed ingredients, one of which is Brewer’s Dried Grain (BDG). Rice husk has been identified as a potential feed stuff and can replace BDG in broiler production. The research determined the effect of substituting BDG with bio-fermented rice husk meal on the blood profiles and nutrient retention of the broilers. Four treatment diets were formulated. T1 (control) contained 15% BDG while in T2, T3 and T4 bio-fermented rice husk meal replaced BDG at 33.33%, 66.67% and 100% to be 5%, 10% and 15% respectively. The diets were assigned to 120 broilers of 28 days old in a complete randomized design of 10 broilers replicated 3 times. The broilers were reared for 28 days after which blood samples were collected. Nutrient retention of the diets was also analyzed. There was a significant (P < 0.05) reduction in the WBC, MCH, MCHC and serum cholesterol level of broilers on the test ingredient. Nutrient retention showed a significant (P < 0.05) increase in ash while the control and T2 were similar (P > 0.05) in crude protein. The research discovered that though there were significant results in most the hematological and biochemical parameters, but the trend of the results was not suggestive that the difference was due to diet. It was concluded that bio-fermented rice husk meal may not have a negative effect on the blood profile of finisher broilers.
Highlights
Rice husk is an agro waste product generated during the milling of rice grain
The result showed that the treated rice husk meal contains 4.22% crude protein, 37.34% crude fiber, 2.90% ether extract., 17.68% ash and calculated nitrogen free extract of 27.86%
The Red Blood Cells (RBC), which is the total red blood count (Jaime, 2005) of the broilers in the present experiment did not present a definite trend to attribute the difference to dietary effect the Mean Cell Hemoglobin (MCH) which is expression of the average hemoglobin content of a single RBC and the Mean Cell Hemoglobin Concentration (MCHC) which is the expression of the volume within the RBC occupied by the hemoglobin (Jaime, 2005) though significantly higher for broilers in the control group but their values for the broilers on the test ingredient did not present a definitive trend suggestive of dietary difference effect
Summary
Rice husk is an agro waste product generated during the milling of rice grain. Rice husk is currently produced in large quantity in Nigeria due to the increasing level of rice production in the country. The annual rice production in Nigeria has increased from 5.5 million tonnes in 2015 to 5.8 million tonnes in 2017 (RIFAN, 2017) and for every 1000 kgs of paddy milled, about 220 kgs (23%) of husk is produced (Koteswara, Pranav, & Anusha, 2012; Benassi et al, 2015). Different degradation techniques abound which has the tendency of degrading materials thereby reducing its abrasiveness Methods such as soaking in hot water, irradiation, acid and alkaline hydrolyses, ensiling, fermentation and use of enzymes and antibiotics have been suggested to have the tendency of reducing the limiting factors in rice husk utilization (Longe, 1998; Cobianchi et al, 2012; Jiaying et al, 2016). The current high cost of feeding animals especially the mono gastric animals, due to high cost of conventional feed jas.ccsenet.org
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