Replacement of Normal Maize with Quality Protein Maize on Performance, Immune Response and Carcass Characteristics of Broiler Chickens

Abstract

An experiment was conducted to evaluate the effect of dietary replacement of normal maize (NM) with quality protein maize (QPM) on performance, immune response and carcass characteristics of broiler (Krishibro) chickens. Six experimental diets were prepared separately for starter and finisher phases. Diet 1 was a control diet formulated with NM and soybean meal. In diets 2-5, the NM was replaced with QPM at 25, 50, 75 and 100%, respectively. Diet 6 was the same as the control diet, but supplemented with synthetic lysine similar to the industry standard. Each test diet was fed to 8 replicates, each of 5 chicks, reared in stainless steel battery brooders. The AME content of QPM (3382 kcal/kg) was similar to that of NM (3,352 kcal/kg), but protein (9.91 vs. 8.94%), lysine (0.40 vs. 0.26%) and tryptophan (0.09 vs. 0.07%) contents of QPM were higher than NM. Dietary replacement of NM with 50% QPM significantly (p<0.05) improved body weight gain, feed conversion ratio, humoral immune response, relative bursa weight, and breast muscle yield and lowered abdominal fat content. No further improvement in these parameters was recorded by increasing the level of replacement of NM with QPM to either 75% or 100%. Further, the improvement noticed in the 50% QPM group was similar to the group fed the NM diet with lysine supplementation, and thus dietary replacement of NM with QPM at 50% did not need extra synthetic lysine supplementation. It is concluded that dietary replacement of NM with QPM at the 50% level resulted in optimum performance, higher breast muscle yield and higher immune response in broiler chickens.

Prospects of quality protein maize as feed for indigenous chickens in Zimbabwe: A review

“…The nutritional superiority of QPM over non-QPM in poultry nutrition has been well established (Omage et al, 2009;Panda et al, 2010;Nuss and Tanumihardjo, 2011;Panda et al, 2014). In the studies referenced above, QPM was found to contain between 30 to 55% more lysine and tryptophan compared to non-QPM.…”

“…Protein requirement in poultry is a function of the amino acid profile, not just the crude protein content, as birds cannot synthesize essential amino acids. In maize based diets, lysine is the major limiting amino acid (Panda et al, 2010). Under commercial production systems, deficiency of this amino acid is offset by the addition of synthetic amino acids or the addition of conventional protein sources such as soybean or fishmeal.…”

“…In a study conducted by Panda et al (2010), it was observed that when QPM was used to replace non-QPM at 25, 50, 75 and 100%, body weight gain, and feed conversion efficiency were found to improve at 50% replacement rate. The results obtained at 50% replacement were comparable with those that were observed when synthetic lysine was added to non-QPM.…”

“…Since the scavenging resource base is deficient in protein, it is unlikely that the IC would attain the desired growth rate (Ncobela and Chimonyo, 2015a). The deficiency of protein reduces feed intake and consequently growth (Panda et al, 2010). This calls for further research to establish the case of IC.…”

Review of Quality Protein Maize as Food and Feed: In Alleviating Protein Deficiency in Developing Countries

“…Therefore, to alleviate these problems, the Government of Ethiopia has set a target to have QPM varieties cultivated on 20% of the country's total maize area in the coming few years including GTP II [27]. In terms of the quantity of energy and protein it contains, QPM has no difference with the normal maize as indicated in Table 1 and Table 2 but the difference lies in protein quality because it contains double the amount of Lysine and Tryptophan compared to normal maize [1,2,28,29] and is essentially interchangeable with normal maize in cultivation and kernel phenotype [17]. The results in Table 1 indicated that the crude protein content of QPM has no significant difference from normal maize.…”