Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

• mohammad houshmand ¹
• Mokhtar Khajavi ²
• siamak parsaei ²

¹ Faculty of Agriculture, Yasouj University

² Department of Animal Science, Yasouj University

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 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.

Keywords

• broiler
• Choline
• Oak acorn
• performance
• tibia

20.1001.1.20096776.1396.19.4.12.4