EFFECT OF INCREMENTAL LEVELS OF AVOCADO POMACE ON PERFORMANCE AND CARCASS PARAMETERS OF BROILER CHICKENS

Abstract

The utilization of fruit and vegetable by-products can contribute to the supply of animal feeds, improve feed deficiency, decrease the costs of livestock feeding, and also mitigate environmental problems by converting these wastes into useful human food. This study investigated the effect of different levels of dried avocado pomace meal (APM) in broiler diets on feed intake, growth performance, carcass parameters, mortality and hematology of broiler chickens. A total of 144 day-old coob-500 commercial broilers were assigned to 4 treatments, each replicated into 3 pens with 12 chicks per replicate. Isocaloric and isonitrogenous treatment diet were formulated. The treatments were a control diet without APM (T1), 5% (T2), 10% (T3), and 15% (T4) Avocado pomace meal (APM) inclusion in the total diet. The actual experiment lasted 42 days. Data on feed intake, live weight changes, growth rate, feed conversion ratio, and mortality were taken. At the end of the experiment, two chickens randomly taken from each pen were slaughtered for carcass evaluation. The APM contains 9.07%, 25.61%, 9.23%, 19.07%, 30.55%, and 3070.24kcal/kg DM of ash, ether extract, crude protein, crude fiber, nitrogen-free extract, and metabolisable energy, respectively. The feed intake of broilers decreased (P < 0.05) with increasing levels of APM in the diet. The highest (P<0.05) feed intake and average daily gain was observed for T1 compared with T4 during the entire experimental period. The highest (P<0.05) feed conversion ratio was recorded for T4 and lowest (P<0.05) for T1. In almost all carcass characteristics and non-edible offal the highest (P<0.05) values were obtained in T1 than T2, T3 and T4. The hematological and biochemical profile were similar (P>0.05) among treatment except platelets. The platelets for T3 and T4 were higher (P<0.05) than that of T1. The water holding capacity was similar (P > 0.05) among treatments. The average cooking loss for T4 was greater (P<0.05) than T1. In conclusion poor performance by the birds was observed in APM fed treatments indicating that avocado pomace meal is not a suitable feed for commercial broilers. Further studies are required to establish the causes of the poor performance of broilers consuming APM whether it can be rectified.