Impact of Temperature Change and Diet on the Growth Performance of Broiler in Thermally Controlled Environment

Abstract

Broiler chicken strains are delicate to heat stress primarily because of no sweat glands. During extreme weather condition, it is important to balance the heat in the poultry house by determining required ventilation rate and needs for supplemental heat. An experiment was carried out to investigate the effect of temperature on the growth performance of broilers using thermally controlled poultry house developed at the Department of Agricultural and Environmental Engineering farm site, FUT Akure. A total of 270 a-day-old broiler were raised in five (5) thermally controlled rooms under different diet regimes and clinical treatment for 48 days (7 weeks). A 5.5.3.3 factorial arrangement of treatments was carried out to investigate the effect of temperature on the growth performance of broilers using thermally controlled poultry house. The results showed that broilers in the control group were consistently lower in weight (≤ 1536.58 g) than broilers under a constant heat stress state (≤ 1990.76 g). Growth of the broilers increased with increase in room temperature between 29 and 32 °C and progressively reduced as temperature increases from 32 – 41 °C. Meanwhile, at 7 weeks, weight of the broilers fed with 100 % of the standard diet (1128.13 ± 208.33 g) was consistently greater than the broilers fed with 80 % (1439 ± 165.01 g) and 60 % of the standard diet (1745.11 ± 177.58 g). Multi-variable regression analysis shows that body weight of the broilers significantly depends on age, % standard diet, relative humidity and temperature-humidity index with fishers value statistics while for group-response, the third level interaction among age, relative humidity and temperature significantly (P = 0.001) contribute to the variation in the body weight of the broilers. Therefore, it was deduced that there is significant effect of temperature change on the growth of broilers raised in a thermally controlled environment.