The evaluation of toasted mucuna sloanei meal as a feed ingredient in broiler diet

The evaluation of toasted Mucuna sloanei meal as feed ingredient in broiler diets was carried out using growth performance, carcass quality, organ weights, anti-nutritional factors and cost implication of the diets as parameters. A total of 120 day-old Marshal broilers were used for this trial. They were allocated into four treatments having three replicates with 10 birds per replicate in a Completely Randomized Design (CRD) experiment. Four iso-caloric (2800Kcal/Kg M.E) and iso-nitrogenous (22.5% CP) diet were formulated. Diet 1 was purely soybean based diet (control diet) while the toasted Mucuna sloanei replaced soybean at varying levels of 5%, 10%, and 15% in diets 2, 3, and 4 respectively. The experiment lasted for 56 days. Proximate and gross energy composition of the toasted Mucuna sloanei crude protein of 28.96%, crude fat (5.61%), crude fibre (8.11%), Ash (4.55%), Dry matter (90.50%), NFE (28.85%) and Gross energy (3.94Kcal/g). presence of anti-nutritional factors such as L-Dopa (3.61%), Tannin (0.17%), HCN(8.27%) were confirmed. For the growth performance, control diet was superior to others with the final weight gain/bird of 1.75Kg, T2 (1.34Kg) that were significantly higher than others. Also T1 had 0% mortality and the least feed conversion ratio value (0.05). For cut-parts T2 had higher values for the prime parts such as the thigh, drumstick, back-cut and wing. While T1 had the highest value for gross margin (416.25a) as opposed to others, T2 (209.79b), T3 (14.73c), T4 (- 143.22d) making it a superior diet in terms of economics of diet. The overall results showed that the toasted Mucuena sloanei even at 5% dietary level of inclusion could not produce good performance, the need then to try other processing methods.