INFLUENCE OF EGG CONDITION, CHICK’S INITIAL WEIGHT AND LITTER MATERIALS ON PERFORMANCE OF ARBOR ACRE BREED OF BROILER CHICKENS

Abstract

Improvement in broiler chickens productivity has been over the years geared towards genetic and nutritional strategies. Aside, other relevant factors that could affect the economic development of broiler chicken are needed to be examined. To this end, influence of egg condition, chick’s initial weight and litter materials were evaluated on performance of Arbor acre breed of broiler chickens. Hatchable eggs categorized as small, medium and large were stored for 1, 4, 7, 10 and 13 days in a cold room, incubated and hatched to examine their effects on the chick weight and subsequent performance, while some of the eggs were used for egg quality analysis. The chicks were then reared on cassava peels, orange peels, palm fruit shaft and wood shavings as bedding materials. The results revealed that the egg length of eggs categorized as large (≥70) had the highest value (4.71cm) and lowest in those categorized as small (4.22 cm). The same trend was also noticed in the egg width, albumen weight and albumen length. The albumen index and Haugh unit decreased as the weight of the eggs increased. Hatchability was highest at 74.50% for eggs categorized as small with average chick’s weight of 38.79g and lowest at 69.49% for large eggs with with average chick’s weight of 49.19g. The regression equations showed that albumen weight and egg size were best predictors of chick’s weight through their R2 values (0.68 and 0.57 respectively) compared to yolk weight with R2 of 0.28. The study of the effect of initial weight of day-old chicks on the performance of broiler chicken showed that chicks from the large group consistently grew higher than those from the small group between age 1-28 days but showed no significant effect with the exception of feed intake at age 1-56 days. High uniformity due to grouping in all the groups was noticed at starter phase (79.23% - 81.23%) and at finisher phase (77.47% -81.67%). Also, as the length of storage increased, the eggs tend to decline in weight leading to increase in weight loss percentage. However, positioning hatching eggs with pointed end up (air cell down) numerically reduced weight loss with about 5.14 %. The storage period and egg positioning during storage had no effect on the external quality of the egg with the exception of shell membrane that decreased as the days of storage increased. The storage period significantly affected all the performance characteristics (FWT, WG, TFI and FCR) in this study at 7 day-old but had no influence at the end of 42 days with the exception of feed intake. More so, any of the litter materials used in this study could be used to rear broiler chickens since none of them had an increased darkling beetle population and bacteria loads that could adversely affect the performance of the birds. It could therefore be inferred that grouping of day-old chicks according to their weight could be of advantage in obtaining uniform broiler chickens to meet specific market demands with improved efficiency.