mohammad houshmand; Mokhtar Khajavi; siamak parsaei
Volume 19, Issue 4 , March 2018, , Pages 891-904
Abstract
This experiment was conducted to investigate the effects of dietary inclusion of different levels of oak acorn(OA) with and without choline addition in broilers diet. A total of 528 one-day-old chicks were used in a factorial arrangement based on completely randomized design, with six treatments, four ...
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This experiment was conducted to investigate the effects of dietary inclusion of different levels of oak acorn(OA) with and without choline addition in broilers diet. A total of 528 one-day-old chicks were used in a factorial arrangement based on completely randomized design, with six treatments, four replicates and 22 chicks per each. Two studied factors were choline (0 and 0.3 % diet) and OA(0, 15 and 20% diet). In starter (d 1-21) and finisher (d 22-42) diets, corn was replaced with 15 and 20 % OA, without any change in percentage of other dietary feed ingredients. The findings indicated that feeding birds with diets containing 20 % OA reduced body weight gain during starter, finisher and entire period (d 1-42) of the study when compared to the diet without OA (P<0.05). Dietary inclusion of 15 and 20 % OA increased feed conversion ratio (except for 15 % OA in finisher phase) compared to the level of 0 %, throughout the study (P<0.05). Dietary supplementation with 0.3 % choline improved starter and overall feed conversion ratio(P<0.05).There was no significant interaction between OA level and choline for body weight gain, feed intake and feed conversion ratio. Replacing corn with OA resulted in a significant reduction in tibia bone ash weight/length index, at 42-day of age (P<0.05). In conclusion, substitution of corn with 15 and 20 % OA reduced the performance of broilers. Addition of choline did not prevent reduction in performance of OA-fed birds.