Growth and conformation traits of turkeys in hot and humid climate

The data were collected from a flock of Belts Ville Small white Turkey to study their performance with respect to juvenile body weight, conformation traits, feed efficiency, viability and reproduction trait like fertilely and hatchability carcass traits. Percent fertility on egg set varied from 62.5 to 76.9 in different hatches and percent hatchability on total egg set varied from 35 to 50% and on fertile egg set it varied from 53.1 to 65 percentages. Male poults maintained their superiority over female poults throughout the period of study at all ages of measurements. The hatch corrected means for males and females respectively were 585.149 and 557.659 for 6th week, 842.50 g and 811.26g for 7th week 1082.14 and 1062.17g for 8th week 1315 g and 1257.3 g for 9th week 1550. 71 g and 1476.08 g for 10th week, 1792.85 g and 1671.30 g for 11th week and 2220.35 g and 2019.65 g for 12th week body weight. Body weight increased with age also weekly gain in weight. Feed conversion ratio varied from 2.77 to 3.51 at 12 week of age similar variation in FCR was also recorded at other ages of measurement. The corrected hatch mean for conformation traits like breast angle, shank length, keel length and neck circumference were 55.42°, 11.66 cm, 10.89cm and 7.17 cm for males and 53.17°, 11.12 cm, 10.29 cm and 6.93 cm in females, respectively. Percent viabilities although varied between hatches was found to be highly satisfactory and ranged from 88.3 to 92.9% in different hatches. Hatch difference for most of the carcass trait was found to be signification where as no signification difference between hatches could be observed for bleeding loss, total viscera and percent abdominal fat. Correlation coefficients were positive and significant. In most cases significant correlation of conformation trait with 12th week body weight did not present any definite trend and varied from positive to negative in different hatches.