THE USE OF UNTRADITIONAL RATION CONSTITUENTS IN FEEDING OF GROWING DUCKS A- DRIED POULTRY WASTE

The present study was performed to investigate the effect of feeding different levels of dried poultry waste (DPW) as untraditional ration constituent on duck performance, carcass traits and some blood biochemical constituents. 60 unsexed one day old Muscovy ducklings were fed ad-libitum on a control starter diet until 2 weeks of age. At that time, they were wighed and randomly distributed into 5 groups each of 12 ducklings. The first group was considered as a control (T1) and was fed ad libitum on a grower/ finisher diet. The other four groups (T2, T3, T4 & T5) were fed diets containing DPW at levels of 5, 10, 15 and 20% respectively. All diets were formulated to be isocaloric (3000 kcal/kg ME), isonitrogenous (16% CP) as recommended by NRC (1994) for growing ducks. The experiment was extended for 10 weeks. The body weight development, body weight gain, feed intake, feed conversion ratio, protein efficiency ratio and caloric efficiency ratio were determined. In addition, some blood constituents, carcass traits, mortality rate and economical evaluation were also measured. The results showed that, there were no mortalities in control group and groups fed diets with 5 and 10% DPW. However groups fed on diets with 15% and 20% dried poultry waste recorded 8.33% and 25.0% mortality rate, respectively. There were no significant differences, in performance measurements between control group and other treatments. There were no significant differences between control group and other treatments in carcass dressing percentage and relative percentage of internal organs. Also, there were no significant differences in blood parameters between control group and other treatments. It could be concluded that, addition of dried poultry waste to the duck diets up to 10% leads to decrease in the cost of the ration without any adverse effect on the duck performance and may help to alleviate pollution problems.