Effect of Replacing Maize with Sorghum on the Growth Performance, Carcass Characteristics, Gastrointestinal pH, Bone Traits, And Profit Margins of Cobb 500 Broiler Chicken Production.

Abstract

The cost of feed in poultry production constitutes about 70 to 80 percent of total production cost and out of this, about 95 percent is meant for meeting the energy and protein requirements of the diet. Therefore, these necessitate the need for cheaper and always available cereal ingredients that can meet the energy requirement of the birds which constitute over 40 percent of the feed composition. Sorghum was identified as the major crop that can easily replace maize because of its similarity in composition with maize. The study examined the impact of replacing maize with sorghum in Cobb 500 broiler chicken diets on growth performance, carcass traits, bone characteristics, gastrointestinal pH, and production economics. The experiment involved randomized treatments, with maize-based diets showing the highest mean, unfermented sorghum-based diets second and fermented sorghum-based diets third. Again, feed cost at the end of the trial showed significant difference among treatments (P=0.039). The maize-based diet recorded the highest total feed cost as shown in table 4.12 followed by treatment fermented sorghum-based diet which recorded a total feed cost similar to that of the unfermented sorghum-based diet. The study found that replacing maize with processed sorghum in Cobb 500 broiler chickens' diets leads to significant profitability differences, with the highest profit observed when comparing maize-based and unfermented sorghum-based diets.