Effect of Elevated Digestible Amino Acids in High Canola Meal Diets on Feed Consumption and Performance of Broiler Chickens

Abstract

In a previous study, we observed that broiler chickens fed high canola meal (CM) diets had lower feed intake (FI) and body weight gain (BWG) compared to the birds fed a soybean meal (SBM) based diet (Toghyani et al., 2015a). The ME content and amino acids (AA) digestibility of the CM used, was determined through bio-assays (Toghyani et al., 2014, 2015b). Subsequently, diets were formulated to be iso-caloric and iso-nitrogenous and the glucosinolate content of CM diets were determined to be less than 4 μmol/g of diet. It was therefore of interest to determine if reduced FI of birds fed CM based diets accounts for performance decline and if this retarded growth rate can be mitigated by increased digestible AA levels in the diet.