ENERGY AND PROTEIN REQUIREMENT OF REPLACE MENT PULLETS

The aim of this work was to estimate the energy and protein requiremen ts for maintenance and gain of replacement pullets. One thousand and f our hundred birds were used, 700 of which were CNPSA Leghorn line bird s (EMB), being the remaining Lohmann (LH) comercial line birds. The ex perimental design was completely random, with four treatments, two lin es, and seven replicates of 25 birds each, placed on floor boxes. The treatments were four levels of intake (T1 = ad lib; T2 = 85% of T1; T3 = 70% of T1; T4 = feed for maintenance). Carcass analysis obtained fr om comparative slaughtering were used for the estimation of the daily metabolizable energy (ME, kcal/d) and nitrogen (N, g/d) requirements 0 ,75 as function of metabolic weight (MW, kg(0,75)) and carcass energy (CE, kcal) and nitrogen (CN, g) deposition. The resulting estimated eq uations were: ME = 142.0 MW + 2.114 CE and N = 0.580 MW + 1.798 CN for EMB; ME = 163.6 MW + 1.762 CE and N = 0.762 MW + 1.616 CN for LH.