GROWTH PERFORMANCE OF BROILER CHICKENS FED ADUSA (Piper guineense) LEAF MEAL

Abstract

An experiment to evaluate the growth performance of broiler chickens fed dietary levels of adusa (Piper guineense) leaf meal (PGLM) was carried out. Actually, 105 1-day- old Chikun (?) strain chicks were randomly assigned to five (5) dietary treatments or diets with 2.5, 5.0, 7.5 and 10% PGLM inclusion levels that represented treatments or diets 2 (T2), 3 (T3), 4 (T4) and 5 (T5) respectively in a completely randomized design (CRD). Treatment 1 diet (T1) without PGLM served as the control. There are five (5) treatments with three replicates each that contained and ten (10) birds per replicate. In terms of final live weight, the highest value of 1.946kg was obtained on birds fed control diet (T1), followed by 1.867kg for 2.5% PGLM, 1.816kg for 5.0% PGLM, 1.726kg for 7.5% PGLM and 1.789kg for 10% PGLM. In conclusion, incorporating adusa (Piper guineense) leaf meal at 2.5% level was optimal for the broiler chicken’s growth. Adusa (Piper guineense) leaf meal had no adverse effect on broiler chicken performance at starter phase while diet or treatment with 7.5% leaf meal elicited better feed conversion with more weight gain and the least cost of feed intake per kg body weight gain.