Abstract

Aim: Purpose of the study was to evaluate of groundnut shell meal (GSM) on performance and haematological indices of finisher broilers.  

Method and materials: The study involved 150 mixed sexed broiler finisher birds divided into five groups of 50 each. The control treatment T₀ had no groundnut shell meal while the other four treatments included replacement of groundnut shell meal with palm kernel cake at 2.5, 5.0, 7.5 and 10 % (T₀, T_2.5, T₅, T_7.5 and T₁₀ respectively). All treatments had the same calculated levels of crude protein and metabolisable energy contents.

Results: Results showed no evidence of effect of treatments on feed efficiency (p> 0.05). However, there was evidence that feed intake, live weight gain, average final live weight of birds receiving the control diet T₀ were lower than those with 10% substitution level of  palm kernel cake (p<0.05). There was evidence that carcasses of chickens fed the T₅ diet were lower (p<0.05) than those fed T₁₀ but similar to T₀ and T_7.5 (p> 0.05). T₁₀ proved to be the most profitable diet.

Conclusion: It was concluded that the groundnut shell meal supplementation in broiler diets could be effectively utilized at 5% to obtain reasonably good growth rate and reduced disease infection risk in the finished broiler birds.

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