Meat quality of Sasso chicken fed rations from locally available ingredients at Nekemte, Ethiopia

Abstract

An experiment was conducted to evaluate meat quality of Sasso chickens fed rations from locally available ingredients in Nekemte city, Ethiopia. Four separate dietary treatments were used for the grower and finisher rations with varying the proportions of experimental diets used. A total of 120 male Sasso T44 chickens with 42 day-old were randomly assigned to treatment diets prepared separately for grower phase (8 weeks of age) and finisher phase (12 weeks of age) in a completely randomized design. The dietary treatments for the grower and finisher phases were formulated from the same feed sources (Table 1) but different in proportion of ingredients to satisfy both ME and CP requirements of the chickens. The four dietary treatments were: T1 [ maize + soybean + lupine + nougseed cake + limestone + salt coded as MSL]; T2 [Wheat grain + soybean + lupine + nougseed cake + limestone, salt + premix coded as WSL]; T3 [maize , wheat +soybean + lupine + nougseed cake + limestone + salt + premix coded as MWS] and T4 [Commercial ration, positive control coed as CR]. Before formulating the treatment diets, composition were done for percentages dry matter (DM%), crude protein (CP%), Crude Fiber (CF%), ether extracts fat (EE%) and total ash (ash%) from ingredients: maize, wheat, roasted? soybean, nougseed cake and roasted? lupin and were also mashed in to 3-5 mm sieve size to be palatable for the chickens. The treatments were replicated three times with 30 chickens per treatment. The General Linear Model (GLM) Procedures of the Statistical Analysis System (SAS, 2008) were used to analyze the data. Fifty consumer panelists involved in testing the sensory property of the meat. The sensory preference data were analyzed using the mixed model of the Statistical Analysis System (SAS, 2008) with the treatments taken as fixed effects and the sense of panelists as random effects. No significant (p > 0.05) difference was observed among chickens fed on the different experimental rations in most of the sensory meat quality parameters evaluated. Similarly, there was no significant (p˃0.05) difference in chemical composition of meat among Sasso chickens fed on the different dietary treatments, except for pH. The pH of Meat from
chickens fed on MSL and WSL were significantly lower than those fed on MWS and CR. However, meat quality of Sasso chickens fed on both CR and MWS was almost similar, based on their pH values, but lower than those which fed WSL. From this it can be concluded that WSL can be used as an alternative feed source to CR in broilers’ ration without any adverse effects on meat quality of Sasso chickens in the study area and areas with similar agro-ecologies of the country.