Dietary Supplementation of Cabbage Leaf Meal (Brassica oleracea var. capitata) on Feed Intake, Growth and Carcass Quality of Commercial Broiler Chicken

Abstract

Purpose: A profitable production of broiler meat is commonly valued for a sustainable poultry business. However, the increasing rate of the price of, especially that of imported feed ingredients is making the poultry industry
less -profitable business. So, an alternative to expensive feed ingredients is a dire need. Under this context, an
experiment was done for 42 days with the objective to investigate the feed intake, growth performance and carcass
characteristics of broiler chickens based on cabbage leaf meal feeding.
Methods: One hundred eighty-day-old Cobb 500 Strain broiler chickens were used. The birds were randomly
allotted into four treatment groups consisting of three replicates for each treatment with 15 birds per replicate.
A mature and compact head of cabbage was chopped and mixed with the basal feed in the various treatment
groups such as T0 (control), T1 (Basal diet + 5% cabbage), T2 (Basal diet + 10% cabbage), and T3 (Basal diet
+ 15% cabbage were randomly allocated to birds.
Results: Findings revealed that T2 had resulted the best performance p < 0.05 in all growth traits studied –,
feed intake and feed conversion ratio, final body weight, and carcass characteristics. Administration of chopped
cabbage leaf to broiler chicken increased their performance and feed intake.
Conclusion: It is, thus, suggested for the inclusion of cabbage leaf ‘at the level of 10% of the basal diet in broiler
feedings.