Department of Animal Nutrition, Veterinary College and Research Institute, Tamil Nadu Veterinary and Animal Sciences University, Namakkal-637 002, Tamil Nadu, India
*Corresponding author: e-mail: p.vasanthakumar@tanuvas.org.in
Online published on 18 September, 2014.
A study was conducted to find out the optimum level of dietary electrolyte balance (DEB) required for alleviating summer stress in commercial broiler chicken. The levels of sodium, potassium and chloride were 13.91, 85.93 and 12.11 mEq for maize, 14.35, 358.57 and 17.27 mEq for soybean meal, 79.57, 271.61 and 18.31 mEq for de-oiled rice bran and 18.70, 55.75 and 22.51 mEq for broken rice, respectively. A trial was conducted using 180 day old broiler chicks by distributing into six treatment groups having 3 replicates in each group. The dietary treatments included different levels of DEB (mEq/kg): 200 (T1), 220 (T2), 240 (T3), 250 (T4), 260 (T5) and 280 (T6). The body weight of T1, T2, T5 and T6 groups were better than other groups (T4 and T3). Feed intake, FCR, hot carcass weight, dressing percentage, liver weight (as % of body weight), intestinal length and immune status were similar in all the groups. The feed cost per kg body weight gain was also similar in all the groups. So, dietary electrolyte balance of 220 mEq/kg or more had no significant effect on the production performance of commercial broiler chicken during summer.
Dietary electrolyte balance, Broiler performance, Summer season
