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Abstract

A 56-days feeding trial was conducted to determine the effect of using the biodegradation sweet orange peel meal (BSOPM) as a replacement of maize in diet on growth performance, nutrient digestibility and haematological parameters of broiler chicks. A total of 180, one-day old broilers were distributed equally into six dietary treatments with 3 replicate of 10 chicks in each in a completely randomized design. The biodegraded sweet orange peel meal (BSOPM) was used to replaced maize at 0, 5, 10, 15, 20, and 25% of the control diet (T0) and five test diets (T5) (T10) (T5) (T20) and (T25) in finishers broilers diets. Laboratory analyses were carried out on the BSOMP and experimental diets to determine its proximate composition and the result revealed that, BSOPM contained metabolizable energy content of 2854.24 kcal/kg and 89.60% dry matter (DM), 7.58% crude protein (CP), 11.11 % crude fibre (CF), 2.89% ether extract (EE), 11.58% total ash (TA), 66.84% nitrogen free extract (NFE). Results also showed that average final live body weight ranged from 798.68 -1582.64g. Average daily feed intake and feed conversion ratio were significantly (p˂0.05) affected across the dietary treatments while final weight gain, average daily weight gain and mortality were not significantly (p>0.05) affected across the dietary treatments. The results of haematological and serum biochemical indices showed that, there were no significant differences (p>0.05) except for mean corpuscular volume (MCV) indicating that no physiological abnormalities resulted from the feeding of BSOPM to broiler chicken.