Performance of chicken broilers using different feeding regimes in the tropics

Three experiments were carried out to study the effect of different feeding regimes and age at changing from starter to growing diets on performance o f broilers. Two hundred males and two hundred females were used in experime nt one and two hundred and twenty females and two hundred males in experime nt two and three, respectively. The sexed one day old Peterson x Hubbard br oiler chicks were obtained from a local hatchery and assigned randomly to 2 4 pens of 5 x 4 m in an open sided building. In the first experiment the fe eding regimes were 2-4-0 and 2-3-1 weeks of the starter, growing and finish ing diets for females and 4-2-0 and 3-2-1 weeks of the same for males. In e xperiment 2, only broiler females were used and the feeding regimes were: 2 -3-1, 1-4-1, 0-3-3, 0-2-4, 0-6-0 and 0-0-6 of the starter, growing and fini shing diets. In experiment 3 only males were used and the feeding regimes w ere: 6-1-0, 4-2-1, 2-4-1, 0-6-1, 0-4-3 and 0-2-5 of these diets. There were significant differences for body weight, feed consumption, carcass yield a nd abdominal fat percentage in experiments 2 and 3. In general, broilers fe d the feeding regimes that included the starter diet seem to weight more, u se more feed and produce less abdominal fat than those given the feeding re gimes that did not include the starter diet.