Vol. 10, Issue 12 (2021)

Author(s):
P Kanagaraju

Abstract:
An experiment was carried out to investigate the effect of in-ovo injection of critical nutrients and early post hatch feeding of early chick nutritional supplement (ECNS) on the chick quality characteristics of commercial broiler chicken. In-ovo feeding trial was carried out with five hundred and forty hatching eggs were randomly assigned to six treatments each with three replicates of 30 eggs. On the 18th day of incubation, each group of 90 eggs were injected with 0.5 ml of 10% glucose solution (T3), 0.5 ml of 0.5% lysine solution (T4), 0.5 ml of 0.5% threonine (T5), 0.5 ml of 0.5% β-hydroxy-β-methylbutarate (HMB) (T6) along with 90 eggs served as non-injected control (T1) and 90 eggs as kepts as injected control. On the day of hatching, the hatched-out broiler chicks (288 numbers) were individually weighed, wing banded and randomly allotted into six treatment groups each with three replicates of 16 chicks each. The feeding of ECNS was started immediately after hatch in the hatcher tray of the incubator and continued till the chicks were placed in the chick transport box except control (T1) which was subjected to fasting for 24 hours to simulate field conditions. The data on hatching egg weight on the day of setting and on the day of injection, hatchability, hatch weight, egg/chick weight ratio, chick transit weight loss and early chick mortality were recorded and statistically analysed by SPSS software. The results revealed that the combined in-ovo feeding and post hatch early feeding of ECNS feeding had significantly (P< 0.01) Increased the hatch weight from 1.04 to 1.28 g than the control chicks. The transit weight loss of chicks was significantly (P< 0.05) affected between treatments with least weight loss of 4.66 per cent was observed in HMB in-ovo fed chicks followed by other treatments (5.75 to 6.46 per cent) when compared with control (6.60 per cent). Significant (P< 0.05) difference was recorded in egg/chick weight ratio of broilers in this study (1.40 to 1.43) than 1.44 of control. The Early chick mortality was ‘nil’ in normal saline, glucose, lysine, threonine fed in-ovo and ECNS post hatch when compared to control. The hatchability was not affected by in-ovo injection of different critical nutrients suggested that this technology can be adopted under field conditions to improve chick quality and subsequent performance.